CKNY was originally launched by local businessmen Gerry Alger and Gerry Stanton in 1955, as a CBC affiliate with the callsign CKGN. The station was subsequently acquired by The Thomson Corporation in 1960, and recalled as CFCH. In 1970, Thomson reached a deal to sell the station to Bushnell Communications of Ottawa, although the transaction was never completed. Around the same time, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission rejected all of the applicants in the first round of license hearings to extend CTV service to Sudbury, the largest market in the region; because the North Bay and Timmins markets were deemed too small to support competing television stations, the commission directed Cambrian Broadcasting of Sudbury and J. Conrad Lavigne of Timmins to collaborate on an alternative plan in which all three cities would receive CTV service without losing CBC. Effectively, the decision declared all three cities to be a single television market, and prevented new television companies from entering and potentially upsetting the balance. In the first revised plan, Cambrian's CKSO-TV, which was now slated to become the CTV affiliate, would simply have added a rebroadcaster in North Bay on channel 4, while leaving the ownership status and affiliation of CFCH unchanged. The CRTC rejected this proposal, however, as it did not adequately resolve the commission's concerns about CFCH's financial viability in the face of competition. Accordingly, in 1971 the station was directly acquired by Cambrian Broadcasting and became an affiliate of CTV and a semi-satellite of CKSO, while Lavigne's new CBC affiliate, CHNB, went on the air at the same time. For a number of years in the 1960s and 70s, CFCH/CKNY operated rebroadcast transmitter CJTK-TV in Témiscaming, Quebec on channel 3. It is not known when it was shut down. Throughout the 1970s, CKNY and CHNB aggressively competed with each other for advertising revenue; by 1980, however, the stations ran into exactly the problem the CRTC had been trying to prevent by linking them to Sudbury in the 1970 hearings: they were losing money and very nearly bankrupt. In 1980, the CRTC approved the merger of the two stations, along with their co-owned stations in Sudbury and Timmins, into the MCTVtwinstick. In 1990, the stations were acquired by Baton Broadcasting. Baton subsequently became the sole corporate owner of CTV, and sold CHNB to the CBC in 2002. In 1999, CKNY began rebroadcasting on channel 11 in Huntsville, Ontario, licensed to Dwight and serving the Muskoka and Parry Sound area on a transmitter which previously rebroadcast the programming of CKCO. Initially a semi-satellite with a very small amount of local programming, the Huntsville station subsequently lost local programming, and then changed its programming and advertising feed source to CICI. Since the acquisition of CTV by Bell Canada, CKNY has gradually downsized its local operations, with all newscasts across the MCTV system centralized out of Sudbury; as of 2020, the station only had three local employees. In May 2020, CKNY closed its local studio on Oak Street, with the remaining employees now working remotely.
