Its opening night program schedule included a special about San Francisco entertainment followed by the usual NBC prime time lineup of the Texaco Star Theater with Milton Berle, The Life of Riley, Mohawk Showroom, and The Chesterfield Supper Club.

In August 1959, the Chronicle reported that the tower was severely damaged by an unusually strong thunderstorm, requiring major repairs before KRON-TV could return to the air.

[13] In 1967, KRON-FM-TV moved to a new studio at 1001 Van Ness Avenue in the Western Addition neighborhood (a location that formerly served as the site of the Roman Catholic cathedral of San Francisco).

[16] By this point, the deYoungs owned three television stations (including KRON) in large and mid-sized media markets around the country, two of which were sold off to LIN TV (which traded KAKE-TV in Wichita and WOWT in Omaha to Benedek Broadcasting in turn).

It finally saw the opportunity to get an owned-and-operated station in what was then the United States' fifth-largest television market and quickly jumped into the bidding war for KRON.

NBC also demanded yearly payments of $10 million from Young, a form of reverse compensation, flipping around the then-normal mode of networks paying their affiliates for their airtime.

That morning, KRON broadcast the Rose Parade from the feed of Los Angeles station KTLA (then affiliated with The WB), with Bob Eubanks and Stephanie Edwards as co-hosts.

The NBC network was near the top of the ratings nationally at the time of the disaffiliation, due to strong shows such as Friends, Frasier, Law & Order and ER.

[26] SF Weekly reported in 2006 that KRON was the first major-market television station to make such a decision and commented, "the results at times are more akin to home movies than news programming broadcast to the nation's sixth-largest TV market.

[31] Young's stock, which had been trading for a few cents per share, was ultimately delisted from NASDAQ in January 2009, after failing to meet the minimum standards for being on the exchange.

[36][37] At the last minute, Young canceled a planned auction of all 10 of its stations five months later on July 14, a move believed to have been made due to a lack of suitable bids.

Station management announced at a November 2011 meeting that no such agreement would take place, and that KRON would instead relocate to a smaller, state-of-the-art facility within the next year to year-and-a-half.

As of September 2024, syndicated programming on KRON-TV includes Inside Edition and Entertainment Tonight which are distributed by CBS Media Ventures, as well as Judy Justice.

The game show pair was moved to ABC-owned KGO-TV in February 1992—seven months ahead of schedule—as a direct result of KRON's experiment with its early prime time schedule that year.

Similar to fellow NBC station KCRA-TV in neighboring Sacramento, KRON-TV stopped airing the Saturday morning TNBC lineup in the early 1990s.

Both select Oakland A's and San Francisco Giants games were aired as part of NBC's broadcast contract with Major League Baseball from 1957 to 1989, including the A's string of three consecutive World Series victories in 1972, 1973, and 1974.

A promotional brochure declared, "each Assignment Four story is concerned with cultural and ethnic activities or perhaps some fascinating phase of life and living in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area."

[54] In the late 1980s, KRON-TV was among the few local television stations in the United States that produced a game show: Claim to Fame, a weekly half-hour program hosted by Patrick Van Horn that usually ran on Saturday evenings.

[55][56] From the 1970s into the late 1980s, the station used Gabriel Fauré's Pavane, Opus 50 as the music played during its nightly sign-off, alongside scenic rustic shots from around the Bay Area.

In the 1960s, KRON-TV had anchors Art Brown and Jerry Jensen (who later moved to KGO-TV), and Linda Richards, who wrote predicted temperatures backwards on sliding glass panels with maps drawn on them, for viewers to see the weather forecast.

Presenters then included Terry Lowry, Phil Wilson, Karna Small, Bob Marsden, Paul Ryan, Art Brown and Dave Valentine.

After Abrams left for New York City's WABC-TV in 1986, Paymar co-anchored alongside Sylvia Chase (who had been a correspondent for CBS News and later for the ABC newsmagazine 20/20).

The station debuted what was then the only local early morning newscast in the San Francisco television market on September 1, 1986, with the launch of Daybreak (which ran from 6:30 to 7 a.m., leading into Today).

The station also produced a half-hour public affairs program on Sunday mornings called Weekend Extra, which was hosted by Belva Davis and Rollin Post.

Despite the overall decline of KRON as an independent, its newscasts initially pulled in respectable ratings though viewership was lower than it was before the station lost its NBC affiliation.

As of September 2013, only studio segments and on-air graphics are presented in HD, footage from field cameras and other news sources continue to be broadcast in widescreen SD until July 2016.

[74] From July to December 2024, KRON simulcast two hours of news programming from its KRONOn streaming service weeknights from 11:30 p.m. to 1:30 a.m.[75] The station's ATSC 1.0 channels are carried on the multiplexed signals of other Bay Area television stations: KRON-TV shut down its analog signal, over VHF channel 4, on June 12, 2009, as part of the federally mandated transition from analog to digital television.

[80] At 10:01 a.m. on March 29, 2023, KRON turned on its new Rhode & Schwarz transmitter at Sutro Tower and began its status as an ATSC 3.0 lighthouse for the San Francisco Bay Area.

The channel featured news, local weather and traffic updates using the common screen template and setup shared among all of Young's automated weather/news information subchannels.

Unlike the cable-exclusive BayTV, it was carried locally on over-the-air digital subchannel 4.2, on cable through Comcast Xfinity channel 193, and was streamed on KRON's website.