The station first signed on the air on September 29, 1974 as WBTB-TV, an independent station founded by Old Bridge Township, New Jersey-based Blonder-Tongue Laboratories. The station's original call letters were intended to be WWRO-TV in its construction permit, but upon Blonder-Tongue's acquisition of the permit from Atlantic Video Corporation in 1972, the calls were changed; the first transmission was a test pattern with a drawing of a shade tree with the WBTB-TV calls. Channel 68 was the third commercial UHF station to sign-on in the northern New Jersey portion of the New York market, after WNJU-TV (channel 47) and future sister station WXTV. Blonder-Tongue's long-term plans for channel 68 was to offer an over-the-air subscription television service to the New York area, consisting of movies, sports and cultural programming. Due to financial issues, the station was forced to go dark on December 27, 1974.