Owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, the station maintains studios and transmitter facilities on Burr Avenue in Mingo Junction, Ohio (mailing address reads Red Donley Plaza in Steubenville).

When the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) opened bidding for the channel 9 license, Rust Craft and CBS emerged as the favorites.

It changed its call letters to WTOV (standing for "We're Television for the Ohio Valley") on June 1, 1979, after Rust Craft merged with Ziff Davis and sold off the radio stations.

During its time as a CBS affiliate, the station struggled in the ratings due to the presence of Group W powerhouse KDKA-TV (channel 2) in Pittsburgh, which to this day remains widely viewable in the area both over-the-air and available on cable.

At the time of the switch, NBC had struggled in the ratings for a number of years and then-market leader WTRF wanted a stronger affiliation.

These factors led WTOV-TV to surpass WTRF-TV in the ratings in the Wheeling–Steubenville market, a position it now holds by a wide margin.

[9][10] Fox programming began broadcasting on September 1, replacing MeTV, which moved to a newly created subchannel.

MeTV, whose affiliation dated from Cox's ownership of WTOV, was dropped altogether on September 1, 2022, in favor of Sinclair's own Comet.

WTOV is also carried on many cable systems that fall outside of its broadcast signal in northern West Virginia, western Pennsylvania, and east-central Ohio.

The station also updated master control to allow for weather warnings and news crawls without downconverting 16:9 video on the main signal to the 4:3 picture format.

In announcing WTOV's Fox subchannel, Sinclair stated that it would carry an hour-long, WTOV-produced 10 p.m. newscast which debuted on October 6, 2014.