WTVA (channel 9) is a television station licensed to Tupelo, Mississippi, United States, serving the Columbus–Tupelo market as a dual affiliate of NBC and ABC.

WTVA was the brainchild of Frank K. Spain, an engineering graduate of Mississippi State University, who had helped build NBC-owned station WNBW (now WRC-TV) in Washington, D.C.

While Technical Director at WHEN-TV (now WTVH) in Syracuse, New York, in the early-1950s, he dreamed of bringing a television station to Tupelo, where he had spent most of his childhood.

This setup, necessary in the days before satellites, enabled WTWV to bring NBC programming to northeastern Mississippi and northwestern Alabama.

It still carried some ABC programming in off-hours (namely, college football on Saturdays) until WVSB (now WLOV-TV) in nearby West Point began operating in 1983.

WTWV built a new tower in the 1970s that not only brought a city-grade signal to Columbus for the first time, but gave the station one of the largest coverage areas in the country.

On July 4, 1979, WTWV changed its call letters to "WTVA" to reinforce its identity, not only as the first TVA city,[3] but also its then-current branding of "TV Alive".

The outlet was the first commercial television station in Mississippi to devote its entire morning broadcast schedule to educational programming.

In the late 1990s, WTVA launched a low-power translator, W22BS, which served as a primary UPN affiliate, before selling the station to rival WCBI in 2002.

By comparison, sister station WLOV broadcast network programming in high definition over a low-power digital transmitter.

On April 20, 2009, WTVA became the first station in the market and second in the state to upgrade local news to high definition level (WLOV's show was included).

More specifically, WTVA's half-hour weekday newscasts at noon and 6 p.m. and its one-hour news and talk program Kay Bain's Saturday Mornin' Show is not seen on WTVA-DT2.