The two stations share studios at Broadway and Battery Street, just north of San Francisco's Financial District; KPYX's transmitter is located atop Sutro Tower.

Together with a call sign change to KPYX, the station launched prime time and morning local news after leaving The CW.

[2] Before the construction permit bore the call letters KBHK, it was originally KFOG-TV and then KHJK-TV, in honor of Kaiser Industries founder Henry J.

[5] The studios at 420 Taylor Street had a broadcasting heritage that predated channel 44 by decades; the facility was built for NBC and its San Francisco station, KPO/KNBC/KNBR, and was also used for a time by KGO.

[6] With channel 44, Kaiser became the latest broadcaster to enter what was then a crowded, meager existence on the UHF dial in the Bay Area.

With signals that were often hindered by the region's hilly terrain, ratings were low, and all but children and sports fans were hard gets for the stations.

[16] The station's traditional focus on prime time movies waned in the early 1990s as channel 44 acquired more first-run syndication, as a new crop of higher-budget shows appeared on the market.

[20] The FCC approved the deal in August 2001 on the condition that Viacom sell one of its San Francisco radio stations.

[23] On January 24, 2006, the Warner Bros. unit of Time Warner and CBS Corporation (which had been created as a result of the split of Viacom on December 31, 2005) announced that the two companies would shut down The WB and UPN and combine the networks' respective programming to create a new "fifth" network called The CW; the day of the announcement, it was revealed that 11 of CBS Corporation's 15 UPN affiliates, including KBHK, would become CW stations.

[29] On July 18, 2023, CBS News and Stations filed a request to change KBCW's call letters to KPYX as of September 1, 2023.

While the newscast came to an end on December 6, 2019, the station provided an hour of CBSN Bay Area weeknights at 10 until cancelling it in June 2020.

In January 2012, KPIX-TV started a short-lived hour-long extension of its weekend morning newscast for KBCW airing on Sundays at 8:30 am, which ended in 2015.