Owned by the Bell Media subsidiary of BCE Inc., it operates as a de facto owned-and-operated station of its secondary CTV 2 television system.

It competed with KSPS-TV in Spokane, Washington, a member of the American Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) that was available on cable in most of the province.

On January 9, 1984, AECC was granted a licence from the CRTC for a terrestrial television station in Calgary, CIAN-TV, to rebroadcast the Access cable feed.

The A-Channel stations were rebranded as "A" on August 11, 2008; on the same date, Access debuted a new A-styled logo and began airing programming from "A" during certain prime time hours.

[7] On January 11, 2016, during CTV 2 Alberta's licence renewal, Bell Media (a successor to CTVglobemedia) requested that the channel no longer be classified as an educational broadcaster.

Despite receiving criticism from a number of groups, most notably from Ontario educational broadcaster TVO, the CRTC approved the request on May 15, 2017, citing the lack of intervention from the provincial government, as well as talks between the government and British Columbia's Knowledge Network to potentially launch a new publicly owned and operated educational broadcast service in Alberta.

Starting March 9, 2009, Access began cabling a province-wide news and current affairs magazine program called Alberta Primetime, from the CTV/Access studios in Edmonton.