At the time, it was apparent that much of the state outside of Birmingham, Montgomery, and Mobile was too poor and too rural to support stand-alone educational stations.

After two years of preparation, the AETC began the nation's ninth educational television station, WEDM in Munford, serving the eastern central part of the state.

When WBIQ in Birmingham came online in April 1955, Alabama became the first state in the nation with an educational television network.

WAIQ in Andalusia (now WDIQ in Dozier) went on the air in August 1956, bringing APT to southern Alabama for the first time before being reassigned to Montgomery in December 1962.

Commercially licensed station WALA-TV in Mobile donated its former transmitter in Spanish Fort to APT in 1964, allowing WEIQ to bring the network to Alabama's Gulf Coast counties that November.

The datacasting model was replaced by APTPLUS, an online distribution of multimedia content that became available to every school in Alabama via the Internet.

In December 2006 it launched a digital "how-to" channel featuring established cooking, gardening, decorating, crafts, and sewing programs called APT Create.

In 1976, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) delayed the renewal of, then briefly revoked, AETC's licenses due to APT's refusal to air programs about the Vietnam War or the African-American community.

In May 2019, APT became one of two PBS state networks, along with the Arkansas Educational Television Network, to decline to broadcast an episode of the animated children's series Arthur because it features a same-sex wedding; APT opted to air a rerun of an earlier episode instead.

[20] Alabama Public Television had also rejected an episode of the spin-off Postcards from Buster that depicted a same-sex couple in 2005.

[22] PBS offered free online streaming of the episode for a limited time to families desiring to view it.