WTSP (channel 10) is a television station licensed to St. Petersburg, Florida, United States, serving the Tampa Bay area as an affiliate of CBS.

The station first signed on the air on July 18, 1965, as WLCY-TV, becoming the fourth commercial television outlet in the Tampa Bay region in a 12-year timeframe, and the fifth overall.

The station debuted a week and a half after[2] the conclusion of a decade-long court battle between five prospective owners seeking the Channel 10 license, including the St. Petersburg Times.

The city of St. Petersburg, owners of WSUN-TV, had been one of the applicants for the Channel 10 license, having jumped in out of fear of losing its ABC affiliation.

As a condition for being placed on VHF channel 10 instead of a UHF placement, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) required the station to produce 20 hours of public service programming each week.

From 1966 to 1967, the station produced 10 á Go Go, a teen dance show hosted by WLCY-AM disc jockey Roy Nilson.

WLCY's transmitter was located at 1754 Solar Drive in Holiday, an unincorporated community in the southwestern corner of Pasco County[4] (where it would remain until 2011).

New owner Alan Henry (of WINS New York fame), general manager Larry Clamage, and news director George "Bud" Faulder began to turn the station around, changing the call letters to WTSP-TV on September 12, 1978, and hiring several new on-air staff members who changed the face of the station.

In June 1979, WTSP began using a logo known as the "sunset 10" (which was later duplicated by its sister station KTSP in Phoenix, Arizona) along with the "Action News" format.

Another technological advance was Tampa Bay's first satellite news truck called "Star 10" which was introduced in 1984, that beamed signals from distant locations to WTSP's Gandy Boulevard studios.

Three months later, in December 1996, the Gannett Company acquired WTSP in a swap deal, selling six of its radio stations to Jacor in return.

Longtime WTSP chief meteorologist Dick Fletcher joined the station in March 1980 and became famous for his forecasting during Hurricane Elena in 1985.

used in promos, as well as a new 4 p.m. lifestyle show, Life Around the Bay; a new, state-of-the-art digital newsroom was also constructed for WTSP's news staff.

On January 14, 2008, WTSP became the third station in the Tampa Bay market (behind WFTS-TV and WFLA-TV) to begin broadcasting its local newscasts in high definition; with the conversion came a brand-new news set (designed by Jack Morton Design/PDG), graphics and music package.

On April 1, 2009, WTSP fired longtime anchor Marty Matthews (who had been anchor of the station's 4 p.m. newscast and a feature reporter for the "Wednesday's Child" child adoption segment prior to her firing) due to budget cuts imposed by Gannett; Matthews had controversially been informed of her termination in a manila envelope sent to her by the station.

The about-face was the result of WTSP switching to a more-traditional news formula, as well as the fact that the "10 Connects" moniker was not understood by many viewers.

The new formats place a larger focus upon stories trending on social media; at the same time, new anchors were introduced for the morning news, including Jackie Fernandez (who previously worked at ABC affiliate WEWS-TV in Cleveland), Rob Finnerty, and meteorologist Grant Gilmore (who came over from sister station WFMY in Greensboro, North Carolina, also a CBS affiliate).

[25] Now, Brightside is anchored by Caitlin Lockerbie, who started in the summer of 2019 coming from WATN-TV in Memphis and Frank Wiley who came in from WEWS in early 2021 after Finnerty left to join Newsmax.

At the time, the station's transmitter tower was still segregated farther north in Holiday due to bygone analog spacing requirements.

However, even after the increase in power the reception problems persisted for area viewers which aim their antennas toward the majority of transmitters for the Tampa Bay market located 35 miles (56 km) southeast in Riverview.

On January 7, 2011, WTSP filed an application with the FCC to move its transmitter from Holiday to the Riverview antenna farm;[32] however, while WTSP remains short-spaced with WPLG, it will give more signal spacing for its Jacksonville sister station WJXX; both WPLG and WJXX also operate their post-conversion digital signals on channel 10.

[34] Northern portions of the viewing area lost the station's signal after the move to Riverview; in response to this, the station received a construction permit for a digital fill-in translator on channel 4 that is licensed to St. Petersburg, but will primarily serve northern Citrus County, from a transmitter located near Hernando.

[37] On December 1, 2020, WTSP joined four other Tampa Bay television stations to collaborate on the launch of NextGen TV ATSC 3.0 in the Tampa–St.

[38] The stations joined other early adopters across the country in rolling out the new third-generation digital TV broadcast technology designed to revolutionize how viewers interact with their home screens.