Like other network stations serving Burlington and Plattsburgh, WCAX-TV has a large audience in southern Quebec, Canada.

[8] On September 26, 1954, Hasbrook signed on Vermont's first television station, WMVT, originally licensed to the state's capital city of Montpelier.

[9] In December 1954, the stations' parent company, WCAX Broadcasting Corporation, was renamed Mount Mansfield Television, after the location of channel 3's transmitter and tower.

The station did hold a secondary Fox affiliation from 1994 through 1997, carrying that network's sports and children's programming.

On May 4, 2017, Atlanta-based Gray Television announced its intent to acquire WCAX-TV for $29 million–a handsome return on Charles Hasbrook's purchase of WCAX radio in 1939.

Gray assumed operational control of the station on June 1, 2017, under a local marketing agreement (LMA).

Cable subscribers in Vermont and New York continued to receive the three stations via direct fiber feeds.

a cable company in Quebec, temporarily replaced WCAX with Detroit CBS owned-and-operated station WWJ-TV.

On weekends, if sports events ran long, the news could be found on the secondary channel, though that practice ended a few years later.

It offered local musicians and artists a chance to perform in front of a live studio audience and showcase their work.

Starting July 16, 2007, WCAX-TV began to produce a weeknight 10 o'clock broadcast on "WCAXtra" known as Channel 3 News at 10.

WCAX-TV relaunched its newscasts with a new look and became the first broadcaster in the area to air local news in 16:9 widescreen enhanced standard definition.

Although it declined to identify the laid-off employees, station officials stated that they were both on-air and off-air personnel.

Owner Peter Martin said that declining advertising revenues due to the economic crisis caused the layoffs.

It specifically mentioned declining automotive commercial revenue, which is a major source of advertising for the station, as the cause of the second round of layoffs.

The station had won dozens[citation needed] of awards under his direction including the Radio-Television News Directors Association's "Best Television Newscast in the United States" in 2003.

The newscast airs on Saturday from 6 to 8 a.m. and Sunday from 8 to 9 a.m.[24] Longtime WCAX meteorologist and on-air personality Stuart Hall (1921–2011) was mentioned in the acknowledgements of the 1984 Rush album Grace Under Pressure.

[25] The station's signal is multiplexed: WCAX-TV shut down its analog signal, over VHF channel 3, on February 17, 2009, the original date on which full-power television stations in the United States were to transition from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate (which was later pushed back to June 12, 2009).

As a part of the repacking process following the 2016 United States wireless spectrum auction, WCAX-TV was relocated to UHF channel 20 on October 24, 2019.

[28] The station has long had significant viewership in Montreal, which is more than ten times as large as its American coverage area.

Like other Champlain Valley stations, WCAX-TV once made a significant portion of its advertising sales across the border.