As public stations signed on in the Los Angeles area, KVCR continued to provide local programming for the Inland Empire as well as telecourses from San Bernardino Valley College and instructional content for schools.

KVCR is also the founding station for the First Nations Experience network, which was started in 2010 with a gift from the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians.

State government support in the early 2020s forestalled a cost-cutting plan which would have seen the KVCR stations switch from public media to student-run outlets.

In 1959, the board of trustees of San Bernardino Valley College gave approval for an exploratory study on activating ultra high frequency (UHF) channel 24, which had been allocated for educational television use by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1952 but was never assigned; recent changes in state law had allowed the community college to set up and finance its own TV station.

[10][11] By 1965, KVCR-TV was broadcasting daytime instructional television for 23 school districts in San Bernardino County, including on translators to rebroadcast its signal.

Several sites, including Sunset Ridge (used by KHOF-TV), were analyzed,[18] but planning soon focused on Box Springs Mountain near the University of California, Riverside campus.

[22] With the new coverage area, KVCR also began increasing its on- and off-air fundraising activities, hiring its first development director and campaigning for donations on the air.

[23] By 1997, when general manager Thomas Little retired after 20 years running KVCR radio and television, the stations had more than 12,700 paid members.

[40] One new addition came in November 2003 when KVCR-TV began carrying a newscast produced by the Inland California Television Network (ICTN), a venture of Cal State San Bernardino, the city, and the Los Angeles News Group.

[42] Another major task for KVCR in the 2000s was relocating the station out of its longtime studio location, North Hall on the Valley College campus.

[43] The relocation had originally been conceived to help allow the station to meet the FCC-mandated technological upgrade to digital broadcasting and specified a site at the former Norton Air Force Base.

[44] However, the station faced an unusually large construction cost; because the facility would primarily be for educational use, it would be subject to Field Act requirements.

[46] In September 2003, PSTV Partners, which operated a television translator on channel 55 (cable 16) serving the Palm Springs area, decided to begin broadcasting KVCR instead of KOCE-TV on its translator because its owner, Jonathan Sussman, felt the Orange County station was not sufficiently responsive to the interests of the Coachella Valley and fretted about a possible sale of KOCE.

[51] In 2010, KVCR received a $6 million donation from the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians to start a television channel airing programming about Native American communities in the United States, with a goal to distribute it nationally.

[54] The KVCR stations, typically reliant on contributions from the community college district for much of their operating funding, began to see cutbacks in the 2010s.

[60] In anticipation of the cash infusion from the auction, 2017 also brought a major rebrand of the KVCR stations as the "Empire Network" along with eight new local shows.

Trustees authorized a plan that October that would likely have ultimately led to the stations becoming student-run outlets and disaffiliating from NPR and PBS.

[65] Community backlash to this proposal was significant enough that trustees contacted Inland Empire representatives in the California state legislature, leading to the passage that July of AB 132, an appropriations bill that allocated $4 million for the continuing operation of the KVCR stations.

[66] In 2022, the state of California allocated $15 million in funding that secured the stations' future as public media outlets and also led to the establishment of a student training lab within KVCR.

The station airs a television simulcast of Inland Edition, the flagship public affairs program of KVCR radio, and the annual Redlands Bowl Summer Music Festival.