WTVP (channel 47) is a PBS member television station in Peoria, Illinois, United States, owned by the Illinois Valley Public Telecommunications Corporation. The station's studios are located on State Street in downtown Peoria, and its transmitter is located along Interstate 474 in East Peoria. Serving as the Peoria area's public television station since 1971, WTVP broadcasts PBS and local programming. Originally housed on studios at the campus of Bradley University but separately owned, WTVP moved to its present facility in 2003. However, borrowing costs from construction and insufficient pledge revenues led to a near-foreclosure and shutdown of the station in January 2008 by its lender. Sufficient support from the community allowed WTVP to settle its debts and remain on the air. History Early years Illinois Valley Public Telecommunications Corporation applied to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on March 10, 1970, for permission to build an educational television station on channel 47 in Peoria—even though channel 47 was not the originally designated channel for such a station. It was the second application for the channel that had been filed within two years, as Bradley University (BU) had also filed with the FCC to build such a station in February 1969. The university had been responsible for broadcasting educational television over closed-circuit and microwave systems to participating schools since 1965, and its transmissions reached 30,000 students in 100 schools by 1967. BU, however, opted to form the corporation with five local community groups: Lakeview Museum of Arts and Sciences, Peoria Public Schools, Peoria Public Library, Pekin Public Schools, and Illinois Central College. Phil Weinberg, an academic dean at the university, also arranged for Sesame Street to be aired locally by commercial station WMBD-TV prior to the station's launch. WTVP began broadcasting on June 27, 1971. For the next 25 years, it was managed by Elwin Basquin, who was named to the station manager post within months of sign-on and rose to general manager and president in the late 1980s; Basquin remained with WTVP until his retirement in 1996. During that time, in 1993, a new transmission facility was built, extending coverage to another 275,000 homes. A downtown move; near-foreclosure In 2000, WTVP announced a large fundraising campaign, "Funds for FortySeven", to finance its conversion to digital television and a move off the Bradley campus to a warehouse on State and Water streets in downtown Peoria; the existing quarters at Bradley were cramped