Originally owned by a consortium of Texas investors including former governor Allan Shivers, it was purchased by the Evening News Association in 1978.

[3] While KVET manager Willard Deason announced the station would be built at "deliberate speed" and be on the air by early 1965,[5] Austinites would have to wait some time to see it.

[9] McAlister sold a majority stake to several other investors which included former governor Allan Shivers, resulting in the creation of the Channel Twenty-Four Corporation as the assignee.

The FCC approved in June 1970;[10] the KVET-TV call letters were changed to KVUE, and a site in what was then far north Austin along Shoal Creek was selected for the studios.

[16] After a hostile takeover bid by Norman Lear and Jerry Perenchio was rebuffed, ENA put itself up and sale and was purchased by the Gannett Company in 1985,[17] a transaction that closed in February 1986.

[27] KVUE was the first Austin-market television station to make a serious challenge in the local news race, which even after the introduction of two UHF competitors was dominated by KTBC.

[29][30] KVUE continued to dominate in the ratings after the 1995 switch of CBS and Fox affiliations, which caused KXAN to surge into second place and a slide for KTBC.

[31] Under news director Carole Kneeland, who guided the KVUE newsroom from 1989 until her death from breast cancer in 1998, the station scaled back its crime coverage to reduce the level of "mayhem" it reported—which resulted in national attention in such publications as Columbia Journalism Review[32] and even a feature on ABC's Nightline[33]—and introduced fact-checking of political advertising, a practice soon adopted by stations across the United States.

[45] As part of the SAFER Act, KVUE kept its analog signal on the air until June 27 to inform viewers of the digital television transition through a loop of public service announcements from the National Association of Broadcasters.