Majority-owned by the Coors Brewing Company of Golden, Colorado, TVN was among the first services of its kind to cater to the growing number of independent stations producing newscasts.

However, it lost millions of dollars throughout its run, being unable to carry out a proposed shift to satellite distribution that would have made it a pioneer in the field, and it also came under fire for being positioned by owner and financial backer Joseph Coors as a conservative alternative to the three major networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC), whose news output he deemed "liberal".

Coors's ownership of TVN and refusal to step down from the post was instrumental in the United States Senate's rejection of his nomination to the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) in 1975.

[10] Two Los Angeles stations took the trial and gave glowing remarks to the service, with Stan Chambers of KTLA calling it "excellent" and "the great logical idea whose time is finally here".

[9] The company had signed up 26 stations by April 1974, with further major-market independents including WOR-TV in New York as well as network affiliates such as KYW-TV in Philadelphia, KSD-TV in St. Louis, and WBTV in Charlotte.

[12] $11 million was to be set aside for the construction of earth stations at affiliates across the country, as many as 35 within seven months, and subscribers such as WCIX considered the installation of these facilities[13] with the possibility of receiving additional non-network programs as more groups switched to satellite broadcasting.

In Los Angeles, five stations (KHJ-TV, KMEX, KNXT, KTLA, and KTTV) were its customers; there were three in New York and four in Toronto, including the CBC (a part-owner of Visnews), CFTO-TV, and the Global Television Network.

[2]: 19  Graf resigned after Wilson, against his orders, hired a camera crew and reported on a bribery scandal in the West German government; he stayed on for a short time as a "marked man".

Leadership turned over in the Washington bureau, where some staffers felt that founding Heritage Foundation president Paul Weyrich exercised influence and even wrote questions at a news conference.

[15] In one of his last acts before resigning, on August 8, 1974, Nixon nominated Joseph Coors for consideration by the United States Senate to be named to the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

[2]: 29  Further attention was attracted when one part of a multi-part front page story reported that May by The Washington Post staff writer Stephen Isaacs profiled TVN and its issues, as well as Coors's attitudes toward public broadcasting; it also disclosed a letter written by Coors to CPB chair Henry Loomis in January 1975 expressing disdain for a public television documentary he felt "wrongly" attacked the funeral industry and noting his interest in "watching closely" such activity.

[18] The Coors reputation for conservatism dissuaded at least one station, WRC-TV in Washington, from signing up, though that city's WTTG and WTOP-TV were subscribers and generally found its content useful.

[16] Another letter to Loomis, asking the CPB to hold off on expenditures for satellite interconnects of public television stations and suggesting it contract with a commercial firm for a system similar to that TVN was considering for its own distribution, also figured prominently.

[24] Joining TVN upon its 1974 purchase of UPITN was Reese Schonfeld, later a co-founder of CNN, who proposed the satellite distribution plan while there but spent what a 1980 profile in Broadcasting magazine called an "unhappy year" with the company before being fired in June 1975.