Owned by Block Communications, the station maintains studios on South Side Drive in Decatur, and its transmitter is located along I-72, between Oreana and Argenta.

Decatur was assigned ultra high frequency (UHF) channels 17 and 23 when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) lifted its four-year freeze on TV station grants in 1952.

[4] The commission quickly issued Prairie a construction permit on November 20,[5] and the station shortly after took the call sign WTVP.

[7] Fabrication of the station's transmitting antenna had become the principal obstacle to going on the air by the start of July,[8][9] with eight changes in the promised shipping date from the manufacturer, RCA.

[10] Even while construction was drawing to a close, issues were emerging involving another station planning to get on the air: WCIA (channel 3) of Champaign, which had hoped to move its transmitter slightly to the east and improve its coverage of Decatur.

[16] The station was a primary affiliate of ABC, though in the first months, programming from all the major networks—ABC, CBS, NBC, and DuMont Television Network—was shown.

Soon afterward, it emerged that three executives—general manager Harold Cowgill, chief engineer James Wulliman, and program director Paul Taff—had resigned instead of complying with an ultimatum from principal owner Shellabarger.

[19][20] A total of 20 employees resigned, all of them identically claiming "an unstable administrative situation" and "proposed changes in program policy".

WCIA, as a very high frequency (VHF) station, had a larger coverage area, better ratings, and more advertiser support than WTVP, WICS, or other UHF outlets.

Shortly after WTVP and WICS failed at the end of 1957 in their joint bid to force WCIA to move to a UHF channel,[23] in April 1958, Shellabarger sold controlling interest in the station to a group of Chicago businessmen fronted by advertising executive George Bolas.

[26] In January 1960, Prairie Television announced the sale of the station to Metropolitan Broadcasting of New York City,[27] which then renamed itself Metromedia in 1961.

[33][34] Metromedia grew rapidly during the time it owned WTVP, and it began to signal that it wanted to shed its Illinois stations in pursuit of larger markets.

In March 1965, the company sold WTVH in Peoria to make room for the potential acquisition of a major-market UHF outlet.

[36] As the WTVP sale awaited FCC approval, Metromedia was already negotiating to acquire KSAN-TV, a UHF station in San Francisco.

[47] However, the shorter and less powerful transmitter did not reach the Champaign–Urbana area, so WAND temporarily relocated its translator at Danville to Champaign, meaning the former city would have to go without ABC programs for months while the Argenta tower was rebuilt.

However, LIN continued to own a third of WAND and operate the station as part of the deal and did not sell the remaining stake to Block until November 2007.