It has made the claim to being Indiana's oldest "continuously operating" television station because WFBM-TV had experienced a transmitter failure which took it off the air for an extended period of time shortly after WTTV signed on.

WTTV originally transmitted its signal from its studio just south of downtown Bloomington, shared with sister station WTTS (1370 AM, now WGCL), which went on the air in March 1949.

The switch took effect on February 21, 1954, and as a result, WTTV's transmitter was moved to a 1,000-foot (305 m) tower near Cloverdale, and the power was increased to 100,000 watts.

In addition to local programming, WTTV aired plenty of movies during the early afternoon hours and in prime time.

Due to the syndication exclusivity rule, it disappeared from most cable systems outside Indiana (except for the Kentucky side of the Evansville market) in the late 1980s.

[6] By the mid-1980s, WTTV began airing more cartoons and first-run syndicated talk shows during the daytime hours, as well as an increased number of recent off-network sitcoms during the evening.

[7] B.G.S., who also owned WWKI radio (100.5 FM) until 1986,[8] had concluded that there were not nearly enough viewers in north-central Indiana for WWKI-TV to be viable as a standalone station, and its merger with WTTV allowed channel 29 to come on the air.

Tel-Am filed for bankruptcy in 1987; Raleigh, North Carolina–based Capitol Broadcasting Company purchased WTTV and WTTK in July 1988, after an attempt to sell the station to locally based Emmis Communications fell through.

In 1997, Sinclair signed a deal with The WB to affiliate with several UPN-affiliated and independent stations that the company either managed or owned outright.

On April 19, 2002, Sinclair Broadcast Group sold WTTV and WTTK to Tribune Broadcasting for $125 million, creating the market's first television duopoly under current FCC regulations with Fox affiliate WXIN;[15][16] the purchase was finalized on July 24 of that year[17] (Tribune held an ownership interest in The WB at the time; however, WTTV could not technically be considered an owned-and-operated station since Time Warner held a 78% majority interest in the network).

In 2023, the Sunday afternoon packages for Fox and CBS became non-conference-specific, still allowing both WTTV and WXIN to carry the bulk of Colts games throughout the season.

WTTV became one of the few stations in the United States, and the second in Indianapolis (after WRTV) to have served as a primary affiliate of all three heritage broadcast networks.

[30][31][32] Due to FCC ownership rules and scrutiny, Nexstar was required to divest two of the stations: the company ultimately elected to sell WISH and WNDY to the owner of Bayou City Broadcasting, in favor of retaining WTTV and WXIN.

The station's digital subchannel on 4.2/29.2 first launched as an affiliate of The Tube Music Network in the fall of 2006, as part of the network's group affiliation deal with Tribune Broadcasting;[34] after The Tube shut down on October 1, 2007, the subchannel switched to a standard definition simulcast of WTTV/WTTK's main channel to provide a quality signal for cable providers before they began instead to downscale the HD feed into standard definition.

[38][39][40] When the network launched on October 31, 2015, WTTV debuted a digital subchannel on virtual channel 4.3/29.3 to serve as an affiliate of Comet.

[41][42] WTTV clears the entire CBS schedule; this differs from WISH-TV, which preempted select programs from the network and passed them to sister station WNDY from 2005 to 2014.

In fact, many cable providers in Indiana began carrying WTTV simply so viewers across the state could watch the Hoosiers and Boilermakers.

Due to cost-cutting measures in the 1990s, channel 4 shuttered its in-house productions and opted instead for syndication deals with Raycom Sports and ESPN Plus.

From 2007 to 2013, WTTV aired basketball games from the "old" Big East Conference, presumably due to the Notre Dame Fighting Irish's large following in the area.

WTTV also previously served as the flagship station for Indianapolis Colts NFL preseason games in the past until 2011, when WISH/WNDY took over the rights.

WTTV traditionally produced statewide boys' and girls' high school basketball tournament finals and high school football championship games; however, after the Indiana High School Athletic Association converted its basketball tournament from a single-class to a multi-class format in 1997, WTTV chose not to renew those rights citing a decline in ratings (the broadcasts subsequently moved to WNDY-TV (channel 23) and then to WHMB-TV (channel 40)); a new agreement with the IHSAA returned these events to WTTV in the fall of 2010.

In November of that year, the station also began running Hoosier High School Sports Classics, a two-hour program that features rebroadcasts of past Indiana high school football and basketball state championship games, interspersed with present-day interviews of coaches and athletes that were involved; it aired on Sundays from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. With the switch to CBS, WTTV became the de facto home station of the Colts, due to CBS' contract to carry a schedule mainly made up of American Football Conference games and Thursday Night Football, and a deal between Tribune Broadcasting and the team making the station and WXIN exclusive broadcast partners.

This means both stations air Colts preseason games, team programming and coach's shows; advertising within Lucas Oil Stadium is also included in the deal.

WTTV, as previously stated, also carries Big Ten games picked up by CBS, including the conference tournament, which is held every other year at Gainbridge Fieldhouse.

Since 2018, WTTV serves as a host station for Australia's 10 Sport during Indianapolis 500 coverage due to Paramount Global's ownership of Network 10.

Capitol Broadcasting abruptly shut down WTTV's news department on November 1, 1990, due to financial problems, with the last 10 newscast airing the night before on October 31; 34 staffers were laid off as a result.

However, with the announcement of the CBS affiliation's move to WTTV, the station announced plans to launch newscasts separate from those on WXIN with its own on-air staff (similar to, though also differing in structure from the shared news operation of St. Louis sister duopoly KTVI/KPLR-TV, the latter of which maintains separate anchors from KTVI for certain newscasts), which is housed out of the two stations' shared facility on Network Place.

Late night horror movies during this timeframe were presented by Sammy Terry, a ghoulish vampire character portrayed by Bob Carter.

In the late 1980s, the station produced a film noir-styled mystery show titled Hide & Sneak, which was related to a scratch-off game distributed at local supermarkets.

In August 2008, Clear Channel-owned radio station WFBQ (94.7 FM) formed a partnership with the Tribune Company to produce a television broadcast of the nationally syndicated radio program The Bob & Tom Show (hosted by Bob Kevoian and Tom Griswold);[57] the pre-recorded hour-long program – featuring highlights taken from that day's radio broadcast – aired on WTTV and co-owned Chicago-based cable superstation WGN America, in an effort by Tribune to bring back programming distributed by the company on its stations.