TVT is the first provincial television station in Australia and Hobart's, and Tasmania's, first television station, delivering its first official broadcast on 23 May 1960. The callsign stood for "TeleVision Tasmania".

Initially it broadcast from the Mount Wellington transmitter on VHF channel 6, to all of Hobart. Its broadcast license area covered all of southern Tasmania, these areas being reached by various repeaters and retransmitters.

It continued to broadcast as TVT-6 until 1982, where it was bought by ENT, owner of Launceston station TNT-9. Both stations began broadcasting under the unified on-air identity of TasTV by 1985, thus becoming for the first time a statewide network. ENT also owned Vic TV in regional Victoria.

In 1988, TNT-9 was sold to Tricom Corporation (later Southern Cross Broadcasting), leaving TVT-6 continuing to service the south as TasTV. And with the dawn of statewwide aggregration rising in the early 1990s, TasTV began its preparation, this time as the Nine Network broadcaster for the state on the very moment it would restart broadcasts to Northern Tasmania thanks to aggregration. It adopted Nine's idents and campaigns and a new slogan, First in Tasmania, in 1993, and the news service was reconfigured to that of Nine's.