WTVF first signed on the air August 6, 1954, as WLAC-TV, originally owned by the Life and Casualty Insurance Company, and Nashville businessmen Guilford Dudley, Al Beaman and Thomas Baker.

Life and Casualty's chairman of the board Paul Mountcastle and his investment group also held controlling interest in WROL-TV in Knoxville (now WATE-TV), but the two stations were not considered to be co-owned.

The call letter change was brought on due to an FCC rule in place at the time forbidding TV and radio stations in the same city from sharing the same base callsign if they had separate owners.

On January 30, 2008, Landmark announced its intention to sell WTVF, along with sister station KLAS-TV in Las Vegas and cable network The Weather Channel.

[2] This was followed on July 14, 2008, with an announcement that WTVF would be sold to Bonten Media Group, which at that time already owned 16 broadcast television stations in five states, including WCYB-TV in Bristol, Virginia.

[16] In addition to locally produced shows and newscast repeats, NewsChannel 5+ also carried programming from All News Channel until that service folded in September 2002.

[21] WTVF began simulcasting any of the Tennessee Titans' TNF appearances in the late half of the season, beginning with the Titans–Jacksonville Jaguars game on November 19, 2015.

In 2022, TNF broadcasts returned to WTVF; currently, any of the Titans' Thursday night appearances air on the station through a simulcast with Amazon Prime Video.

In the mid-1980s, WTVF shared with WZTV the local broadcast rights to Southeastern Conference basketball games produced by the Lorimar Sports Network until that syndication service dissolved after the 1985–86 season.

During the 2024–25 season, WTVF announced an agreement to simulcast three Nashville Predators games alongside FanDuel Sports Network South.

The station's relation to WLAC, which was known for many years for its nighttime soul music programming, led it to air a groundbreaking show on Friday and Saturday nights during the mid-and late-1960s called Night Train hosted by Noble Blackwell (a disc jockey on Nashville soul radio station WVOL (1470 AM)), which featured R&B performances and dancing similar to American Bandstand.

In March 1984, WTVF launched its locally produced magazine format program, Talk of the Town, hosted by Debbie Alan.

There is also live gavel-to-gavel coverage of high-profile criminal trials in the Nashville area including those of Paul Dennis Reid, Perry March, Mary Winkler, Lindsey Lowe, as well as the three suspects in the Holly Bobo case, the latter of which gained national attention in the 2010s.

[28] A full broadcast of the August 8, 1974, 6 p.m. newscast exists in the Vanderbilt Television News Archive in Nashville, the result of the Archive's staff inadvertently leaving recording equipment on after taping CBS News' coverage of the events leading to the resignation of President Richard Nixon at 5:30 p.m., in the wake of the Watergate scandal.

[29] The broadcast featured interviews with Nashville-area and Tennessee politicians about that day's events in Washington and was anchored by Harry Chapman, with Ron Kaiser doing the weather and Hope Hines the sports.

Main anchor Chris Clark filed a telephone report from Washington concerning reaction from the senators and representatives in Tennessee's Congressional delegation.

Since it was not the policy of the Archive to record local newscasts alongside network ones and this occurrence was quite accidental, this may well be the only preserved, full-length Nashville television news broadcast prior to the late 1970s (when videocassette recorders became widely marketed to the public), other than local cut-ins to network election coverage and two 1973 special broadcasts of Today (on WSM-TV).

[30] In 1974, WLAC became the first network affiliate in the country to use Electronic News Gathering (ENG) to bring live field reports to its viewers.

[31][32] On February 2, 2007, WTVF unveiled a new on-air look complete with a new state-of-the-art news set, weather center, and graphics in tandem its official upgrade to high definition newscasts (becoming the 25th television station in the United States to broadcast its local news programming in high definition and one of only four at the time with an HD weather center and system).

This occurred while meteorologists Ron Howes and Joe Case were broadcasting live, showing the actual tornado from the station's SkyCam as it entered downtown Nashville.

As WLAC-TV, the station helped launch the career of a young African-American reporter and local Nashvillian named Oprah Winfrey by making her a regular news anchor in the early 1970s.

On July 6, 2009, the station filed an application to operate a low-powered digital translator on UHF channel 50, broadcasting at 100 kW, to serve viewers that could not receive the VHF signal.

[48] On July 31, 2009, WTVF began simulcasting on its digital subchannels the over-the-air relaunch of "NewsChannel 5+" (originally a cable-only channel) on 5.2 and the addition of classic movie network, This TV on 5.3.

[49][50][51] Due to the station's participation in the FCC's 2016–17 spectrum incentive auction, WTVF filed for a construction permit to relocate its digital allocation to UHF channel 36.

Viewers residing in several areas outside of the Nashville media market can view WTVF, depending on the cable provider and location.

WTVF is a significantly viewed station in the Bowling Green, Kentucky, television market, owing to its transmitter being located on the north side of Nashville.

For its first 52 years on the air, WTVF had a decades-long monopoly in providing CBS programming to several counties in south-central Kentucky as that area was originally part of the Nashville market until Arbitron collapsed Bowling Green into its own market area in 1977 as a result of the growth and success by that city's ABC affiliate WBKO.

That provider dropped WTVF, WSMV and their associated subchannels from their lineup in late 2017 as WNKY and WNKY-DT2 claimed market exclusivity in terms of NBC and CBS affiliates on that system.

[57] Mediacom carries the station's main channel on their systems in Caldwell and Crittenden counties, including the communities of Princeton and Marion, both of which are in the Paducah, Kentucky–Cape Girardeau, Missouri–Harrisburg, Illinois media market.

[63] From 1957 until the 1980s, WTVF, along with WSMV, WKRN, and later WZTV, were all carried on cable systems in northern Alabama, including the Huntsville, Florence and Decatur areas.