The station was owned by Oscar Covington and his family along with WCOV radio (now WGMP) and two other radio stations in Alabama. Oscar's brother, George William "Will" Covington, who had founded WCOV radio in 1939, had applied for a television license in 1949 and was on a trip to Chicago to buy equipment at the time of his death later that year. It lost NBC when WSFA launched in 1954 and ABC when WSLA-TV (channel 8) in Selma started up in 1960. DuMont programming went away in 1956 after that network shut down. The Covington family sold the station to Gay-Bell Corporation of Lexington, Kentucky in 1964.