KTLA 5 News online - Television live

KTLA 5 News Live Stream

KTLA 5 is Los Angeles' CW flagship - and the West Coast's founding television station: the first commercially licensed station in the western United States, on the air since 22 January 1947. Owned by Nexstar Media Group as the network's largest directly owned property, broadcasting from Sunset Bronson Studios on Sunset Boulevard with its transmitter atop Mount Wilson, it pairs The CW's programming with a news operation that helped invent television news itself, and its newscasts also stream live online.

Channel 5's identity runs deeper than any network affiliation: a station that launched from a Hollywood movie lot, proved what live television news could do, and has been Los Angeles' morning habit for four decades.

KTLA 5 News and SKY5

KTLA 5 News covers the nation's second-largest market with the full apparatus: the KTLA 5 Morning News - the region's morning institution, the show Los Angeles wakes up with - and SKY5, the news helicopter whose live coverage of breaking events, high-speed chases and, lately, the coastal flooding and wildfire stories that define Southern California's news cycles streams live to a digital audience in the millions. The station's breaking-news heritage shows up in everything it does, from earthquake coverage to the entertainment-industry news that Los Angeles treats as local news, and the live stream carries the whole operation around the clock.

The First in the West

Channel 5 began as W6XYZ, an experimental station licensed in 1939 and put on the air in 1942 by Paramount Pictures, run by twenty-six-year-old television pioneer Klaus Landsberg from a corner of the studio lot. Licensed for commercial operation on 22 January 1947, it became the first commercial television station in California, the first in Los Angeles, the first west of the Mississippi and the eighth in the United States - inaugurated with a live broadcast hosted by Bob Hope, who famously introduced the new station as "KTL," dropping the final letter. After early DuMont and independent years, the station found its calling in live news: its marathon coverage of the 1949 Kathy Fiscus well disaster - more than a day of continuous live broadcasting, in an era when television news barely existed - is remembered as the moment TV news grew up. The modern affiliations came later: The WB in 1995, The CW in 2006, and Nexstar ownership in 2019, which made channel 5 the network's West Coast flagship.

Sunset Bronson and the Superstation

KTLA broadcasts from Sunset Bronson Studios, the historic Hollywood lot where the station has spent its life, with the Mount Wilson transmitter carrying the signal across the basin from the mountains above Pasadena. The station's reach has always exceeded its market: superstation carriage on DirecTV and Dish put KTLA in homes across the West and Canada for decades, and a streaming news radio channel on iHeartRadio extends the operation's audio side. For a station that premiered commercial television in the West from a garage on a movie lot, the modern operation - CW flagship, Nexstar's largest, streaming live to every screen - is the continuation of a very old habit: first with the story, in the market where the story usually is.

KTLA 5 News Watch Live Streaming now online