That studio—expanded by the WBEN stations—had originally been built for WBUF-TV, which had gone dark in 1958, two months before the sign-on of present-day ABC affiliate WKBW-TV (channel 7).

[9]: 260-262 When the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) disallowed same market co-ownership of newspapers and broadcast licenses in the early 1970s, the combination of the Buffalo Evening News and WBEN-AM-FM-TV was grandfathered under the new rule.

With the loss of the WBEN stations' grandfathered protection, Berkshire Hathaway opted to keep the newspaper and sell off the broadcasting properties.

[10] The call-letter change was triggered due to an FCC regulation at the time prohibiting TV and radio stations in the same city, but with different owners, from sharing the same call letters.

Channel 4 was then sold to King World Productions (at that time a separate entity from both Viacom and CBS; the two would later split and remerge) for $100 million in 1988.

WIVB-TV gained the local rights to the Buffalo Bills from WGRZ-TV in 1998, when the American Football Conference package moved to CBS.

Van Miller, channel 4's longtime sports director, was the Bills' play-by-play announcer from 1960 to 2003, except for a brief time in the 1970s when WKBW radio was the flagship.

However, beginning in 2014 with the introduction of "cross-flex" scheduling, the NFL started arbitrarily moving select Bills games to WUTV, the local Fox affiliate.

[21] The merger was completed on December 19, bringing WIVB-TV and WNLO under common ownership with ABC affiliate WTEN and the same management as Fox affiliate WXXA-TV in Albany;[22] because Media General is part-owned by Warren Buffett, the merger also brought WIVB back under co-ownership with The Buffalo News, as Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway owns that newspaper, and the newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership ban has since been lifted.

Channel 4 then spent most of the next 30 years as a solid, if usually distant, runner-up to WKBW-TV, well ahead of market laggard WGR-TV (later WGRZ).

[24] By 2000, after the retirement of WKBW-TV's longtime anchorman Irv Weinstein and weather anchor Tom Jolls – the last of the traditional "Irv, Rick and Tom" team at channel 7 – and Nielsen's adoption of market metering in Buffalo at the same time, WIVB-TV had taken over the number-one spot for the first time in over a quarter century.

It remained number one for the next decade until a series of budget cuts, a retransmission consent dispute with Time Warner Cable,[25] and the slow response to replace departing news anchors pushed most of its newscasts to second, behind WGRZ, who has since also come under ownership of a major national media company.

WIVB has long been considered to favor older viewers, even dating back to the 1970s when its rivals were promoting flashier, more sensational approaches to the news.

[26] Walker announced her retirement from the anchor desk in April 2024 as she moves into a senior correspondent role[27] previously held by her former co-anchor Rich Newberg.

The station has also typically differed in its approach to hiring meteorologists in that none of them are Western New York natives (whereas WKBW and WGRZ hired mostly local personalities); Kaylee Wendt, the last meteorologist to have lived in western New York before arriving at WIVB, left the station in February 2019.

The news operation at WIVB-TV has historically favored a straight newscast, as opposed to the more activist approach of WGRZ (WIVB-TV highlighted this in an advertising campaign in the mid-2000s, when it used the slogan "today's news and tomorrow's weather" and asserted that it "doesn't take sides," a reference to WGRZ's use of the "On Your Side" slogan).

Since 1993, the station has produced an annual holiday promo featuring a custom version of Jolly Demis's "Christmas Time Again".

(The weekend edition was originally co-anchored by Chuck Gurney, the first openly gay television personality in the Buffalo market.

From approximately 1995 until the end of 2009, WIVB-TV built and operated a large network of over eighty AWS/WeatherBug weather stations (under the name "Neighborhood WeatherNet"), mostly at local schools.

[36] For most of the time since 2000, WIVB-TV has been the most-watched news station in Western New York (according to Nielsen) after rival WKBW-TV's long winning streak ended.

It has become so dominant in the market that it at one time garnered the highest television ratings for a local newscast in the entire nation, according to advertisements run by the station, an honor regained in February 2008.

As of late, rival WGRZ, which has also had strong ratings in the area has begun to challenge WIVB-TV's dominance, specifically in the weeknight 5 and 5:30 newscasts according to Nielsen's May 2007 sweeps data.

This station reclaimed the top position in the November 2007 sweeps although still in a statistical tie with WGRZ, and as of May 2009, is now solidly back in first place.

[44] Because WNLO's broadcast signal is centered further north than the former WIVB-TV Tower that was in Colden, the move further deteriorated reception of the channel in the western Southern Tier, where it had already been marginalized after the first digital transition and move to UHF, while at the same time improving the station's coverage along the Golden Horseshoe in Ontario, including a city-grade signal in Toronto.

[46] WIVB-TV has had significant contract disputes with both of the major cable television providers in the station's coverage area, Time Warner Cable (now Spectrum) which covers most of Western New York and Atlantic Broadband (now Breezeline) which covers much of its Northern Pennsylvania area as well as the rest of the Western New York region.

Buffalo Bills games and some CBS programs were restored in Niagara County through Toronto-based CTV station CFTO-TV (and in other parts of the region through WROC-TV and WSEE-TV).

In Erie, Cattaraugus, Allegany, and western Steuben counties, WIVB-TV continues to (in addition to block its signal) enforce its syndication exclusivity on Bills games preventing them from being brought in from another market.

[48] Atlantic Broadband announced it would discontinue carrying WIVB-TV in favor of WSEE-TV on January 1, 2009, and were apparently making no effort to negotiate a new deal.

On March 4, 2011, LIN Media pulled WIVB-TV and WNLO from Dish Network (the same service WIVB-TV and WNLO explicitly advised viewers to change to during the Time Warner Cable dispute) due to the expiration of the existing retransmission consent agreement; the blackout lasted nine days.