The commission is managed by an independent board of university and education officials, and gubernatorial appointees representing each of Arkansas's four congressional districts.

The legislative language indicated that such a service was necessitated to help prevent the spread of communism in the state, as "counter-measures to such subversive influences [were] necessary to the continued existence of constitutional democracy."

[5][6] Subsequently, on September 23, 1963, Donrey Media donated the construction permit for defunct NBC affiliate KFOY-TV (channel 9) in Hot Springs to the AETC for $150,000, funded in part through a $100,000 gift from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation.

The station maintained limited hours of operation, exclusively airing Monday through Friday, during its early years; its initial programming, through a cooperative agreement with the Arkansas Department of Education, was focused primarily on instructional telecourse lectures and course subjects for use in Arkansas schools and attributable for college credit during the morning and afternoon from August through May; NET programming also aired during the late afternoon and early evening year-round.

On October 5, 1970, KETS—like the full-power repeaters it would sign on in later years—became a member station of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which was founded the previous year as an independent entity to supersede and assume many of the functions of the predecessor NET network.

[18][19] In 1973, the Arkansas General Assembly approved the plan and associated funding to expand educational television programming to the entire state through KETS.

KETG (channel 9) in Arkadelphia was the first to sign on the air on October 29, 1976, providing public television service to southwestern Arkansas from a transmitter near Gurdon; less than two months later, on December 9, KAFT (channel 13) in Fayetteville—transmitting from atop Sunset Mountain (near Winslow)—debuted as the network's third station, servicing most of Northwest Arkansas including nearby Fort Smith.

[20]) The AETC launched its fourth full-power station on January 13, 1977, when KTEJ (channel 19) in Jonesboro signed on from a transmitter in Bono, extending its reach into portions of northeastern Arkansas as well as adjacent border areas of western Tennessee and the Missouri Bootheel.

The last of the original satellites to debut was KEMV (channel 6) in Mountain View, which signed on June 21, 1980, to provide service to north-central Arkansas as well as parts of extreme south-central Missouri from a transmitter located just east of Fox.

)[2] To aid these efforts, in 1984, the AETN Foundation (now the Arkansas PBS Foundation) was established as an independent endowment trust for the network's public and private fundraising efforts, soliciting and receiving permanent endowment donations to help support the network and commission's operations; it is presided by the eight AETC commissioners and seven at-large elected lay members.

After ruling in favor of the AETC, Forbes filed an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, which reversed the lower court's decision in September 1996, ruling that AETN (as the debate's sponsor) created a limited public forum from which all qualifying candidates had a presumptive right of access and could not be excluded (even based on viability grounds as AETN officials determined) unless for a particularly exceptionary reason.

[24][25][26][27] Concerned that the Eighth Circuit's ruling could result in fewer political and controversial social issue-based debates and diminished political coverage by public broadcasters, the AETC appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court; on May 18, 1998, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the AETC, 6–3, in Arkansas Educational Television Commission v. Ralph P. Forbes, affirming that government-run stations do not run afoul of the First Amendment in exercising "viewpoint-neutral […] journalistic discretion," that state-owned public broadcasters were not required to invite all ballot-qualified third-party or fringe candidates to participate in their debates, and that state employees can exclude candidates outside the two major parties without violating their free speech rights.

[31] On January 11, 2008, KETS's analog transmitter was destroyed when the Redfield broadcast tower collapsed while engineers were adjusting the guy wires supporting the structure.

[41] In March 2020, as a result of its role in delivering instructional television programming, Arkansas PBS was awarded $6.4 million in state CARES Act funds to build five new low-power translators to fill gaps in the network's statewide coverage and provide over-the-air access to PBS programming to part or all of 31 Arkansas counties that previously received weak or no signal coverage from the six main transmitters (which would extend the network's broadcast reach to an additional 23.5% of the state's population).

Programs that have been refused carriage have included NET's February 1967 presentations of the stage adaptation of An Enemy of the People (following complaints from a group of 10 Mena-based ministers over profanity featured in the play) and Ten Blocks on the Camino Real (which program director Fred Schmutz called "profane and lewd"; he also remarked that he "could no more air it than [he] could fly"); VD Blues, an October 1972 special (also declined by Mississippi Educational Television) that featured dramatic sketches illustrating the struggles of venereal disease, and Tongues Untied, a 1991 documentary on homosexuality in the Black community (due to suggestive language).

Initially assigned UHF allocations for all five full-power digital relays, AETN elected to reassign VHF frequencies for the digital channels of KETS and its satellites (except KETJ) to reduce operational expenses; KETS and KEMV operated at reduced power until the transition to prevent analog co-channel interference with KFSM-TV in Fort Smith and adjacent channel interference with WMC-TV in Memphis, respectively.

(KETS traded its original UHF 47 allocation with Sheridan-licensed KWBF-LP [channel 5, now defunct], then an analog translator of Little Rock-based KWBF-TV.)

DirecTV provided subscribers in the Little Rock and Monroe–El Dorado markets access to the default PBS Satellite Service feed in place of KETS and KETZ.