[3] Although not as widespread in national carriage as its Chicago sister station WGN-TV, KTLA is available as a superstation via DirecTV[4] and Dish Network (the latter service available only to grandfathered subscribers that had purchased its a la carte superstation tier before Dish halted sales of the package to new subscribers in September 2013), as well as on cable providers in select cities within the southwestern United States and throughout Canada.

Estimates of television sets in Los Angeles County at the time ranged from 350 to 600, since experimental station W6XAO (later KTSL and KNXT, now KCBS-TV) was already in operation broadcasting with a regular schedule.

[6] Hope delivered what was perhaps the most famous line of the telecast when, at the program's start, he identified the new station as "KTL" – mistakenly omitting the "A" at the end of the call sign.

[9][10][11] The service never gelled into a true television network, but during KTLA's early years, the station produced over a dozen series that were syndicated in much of the U.S., including Armchair Detective,[12] Bandstand Revue,[13] Dixie Showboat, Frosty Frolics,[14] Hollywood Reel,[15] Hollywood Wrestling, Latin Cruise,[12] Movietown, RSVP,[16] Olympic Wrestling,[16] Sandy Dreams,[14] and Time for Beany.

KTLA is currently the only Los Angeles area broadcaster that remains based in Hollywood as many other television and radio stations have moved to other parts of the region.

[19][20] During the 1970s, KTLA was uplinked to satellite and became one of the nation's first superstations; the station was eventually carried on cable providers across much of the United States located west of the Mississippi River.

Children's programs, with the exception of weekend morning Popeye cartoons (which originally came from former parent Paramount,[21] but had been sold off to what became the syndication arm of United Artists Television[22]), were also phased out.

In 1979, KTLA acquired much of the programming inventory of struggling independent competitor KBSC-TV (channel 52, now Telemundo owned-and-operated station KVEA) including The Little Rascals, The Three Stooges, The Munsters, The Addams Family, Gilligan's Island, and Leave It to Beaver, among others.

[28] KTLA spent much of the early and mid-1980s battling KTTV (channel 11) for the spot of the top-rated independent station in Southern California, offering a variety of general entertainment programs including movies, sports and off-network reruns; it took the top spot among the market's independents full-time after KTTV became a Fox charter station upon that network's start-up in October 1986.

[35] The station changed its branding to "KTLA 5, The CW" on September 17, 2006, immediately after the airing of The WB's final broadcast, The Night of Favorites and Farewells.

In addition to the station itself, six other individuals associated with KTLA—former owner Gene Autry, newsmen Hal Fishman, George Putnam, Stan Chambers and Larry McCormick, and founding manager Klaus Landsberg—have received stars on the Walk of Fame.

[37] There had been speculation that KTLA would move into the Los Angeles Times Building in downtown Los Angeles, combining operations and staff with the Times newspaper; this arrangement is also used by two other Tribune combined newspaper-broadcast operations: Miami's WSFL-TV is based in the offices of former sister newspaper Sun-Sentinel, while the Hartford duopoly of WTIC-TV/WTXX moved into new facilities in the Hartford Courant building in December 2009.

The "LA" in the KTLA callsign is rendered in bold lettering to emphasize the station's Los Angeles location and coverage area, similar to a previous wordmark logo used from 1997 to 2005.

[44] Nexstar renewed their affiliation deal with The CW on May 20, 2021, which covered the company's then-37 CW-affiliated stations in many media markets, including KTLA.

On January 6, 2018, the station began airing the OMM block again on a three-hour delayed basis, this time from 11 a.m. to 2 pm, due to the expansion of its weekend morning newscast to five hours.

KTLA also broadcasts the San Diego Big Bay Boom July 4 fireworks show, with coverage produced by sister station KSWB-TV.

The station would return to its over-the-air relationship with the Dodgers on September 2, 2016, when KTLA entered into an agreement with Charter Communications (which had acquired Time Warner Cable's Southern California systems earlier that year through its acquisition of the latter cable provider) to simulcast six regular season games scheduled for the final two weeks of the 2016 season to which regional sports network SportsNet LA already held rights to broadcast through its contract with the Dodgers.

This arrangement would extend into the following year, when on March 8, 2017, SportsNet LA agreed to simulcast ten Dodgers games scheduled during the first and last five weeks of the 2017 regular season on KTLA.

[49][50][51] The original decision for the simulcasting arrangement was made after complaints were raised that fans would not be able to watch the final broadcasts of retiring legendary commentator Vin Scully, since SportsNet LA's availability in Southern California is primarily limited to Charter Spectrum systems because of disagreements between Charter/TWC and five major television providers serving the region (Cox Communications, Frontier FiOS, AT&T U-verse, DirecTV and Dish Network) over transmission rates that have prevented them from agreeing to carry the channel.

Other than telecasts of preseason games from the Las Vegas Raiders (who were based in Los Angeles from 1982 until the team returned to Oakland in 1994) syndicated by the Las Vegas Silver and Black Network, along with a 30-minute show each weekend during the regular season before the game, KTLA does produce one sporting event each year, the LA Marathon, which features many of the Morning News on-air staff, along with running specialists on a Sunday morning in February/March of each year.

KTLA's news department is located inside the former Warner Bros. Cartoons studio (known as the Hal Fishman Newsroom since 2000) at the corner of Van Ness and Fernwood in Hollywood.

Although KTLA does not cover police pursuits as much as other stations, it has put more emphasis in local crime stories, as opposed to politics, health and other serious news.

Accompanying his news anchoring career, McCormick also hosted Making It!, a public affairs program on the station which featured stories on the entrepreneurial successes of ethnic minorities.

In March 1991, KTLA was the first station to air the infamous video of Rodney King's beating by three Los Angeles police officers, whose eventual acquittal sparked rioting within the city in 1992.

On January 13, 2007, KTLA became the second television station in the Los Angeles market (after KABC-TV) to begin broadcasting its local newscasts in high definition.

While the 3 p.m. broadcast was a permanent addition, the 2 p.m. newscast was intended as a temporary fill-in that ran until December 31, 2014 (it was replaced two days later on January 2, 2015, by a double-run of Celebrity Name Game).

On December 27, 2018, KTLA Weekend News anchor and reporter, Chris Burrous, was found unconscious from a methamphetamine overdose in a Days Inn hotel room in Glendale, California.

At precisely 9 am, VIP Milton Berle threw the ceremonial "Transmit On" switch, as he did at the Chicago World's Fair in 1939 at the birth of analog television broadcasting.

Veteran newsman Stan Chambers, who was hired by KTLA almost a year after its 1947 launch and remained with the station until his retirement in 2010, was given the honor of "throwing" a ceremonial mock switch from the analog to digital position, signaling the engineers to shut down the analog signal at its Mount Wilson transmitter site at 10:45 pm, during KTLA's Prime News telecast.

[90][91] As part of the SAFER Act,[92] KTLA temporarily restored its analog signal 15 minutes later at 11 p.m. to inform viewers of the digital television transition through a loop of public service announcements from the National Association of Broadcasters, which ran until June 26, 2009.