In 1963, several men first met at Coughlin High School in Wilkes-Barre to discuss bringing an educational television station to Northeastern Pennsylvania.

Twelve of the men formed the Northeast Pennsylvania Educational Television Association, chaired by Wilkes-Barre superintendent of schools Walter Wood.

[citation needed] On December 16, 2007, the top section of WVIA's tower collapsed due to severe ice, wind, and snow.

After the incident, WVIA quickly put the analog TV signal back on the air through the use of a shorter back-up tower and antenna also located on Penobscot Knob.

Earlier that same day, the neighboring tower supporting the antennas for analog WNEP-TV and WCLH (90.7 FM) collapsed completely due to the ice and winds.

[5] On February 17, 2009, WVIA-TV shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 44, meeting the original target date on which full-power television stations in the United States were to transition from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate, which was later pushed back to June 12, 2009.

[1] WVIA suffered another disruption to its signal on February 12, 2010, when the building housing the transmitters for WVIA-TV and WVIA-FM was destroyed by fire.

[7] The station returned to the air as of February 15, 2010 with assistance from WNEP-TV, using the ABC affiliate's transitional digital channel 49 transmitter and tower.

WVIA has historically aired children's programs during the day, and for many years, when it was an hour-long program, aired Sesame Street three times on weekdays, including the previous weekday's episode in the morning, and the current day's episode at noon and at various times in late afternoon.

With the advent of the PBS Kids subchannel, WVIA has scaled back its children's programming on weekdays from 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. on its main channel.