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.

ASN remained, for all intents and purposes, the Citytv affiliate in Atlantic Canada, and for about another decade carried a similar mix of movies and series in primetime.

However, by the mid-2000s, the amount of CHUM programming on the ASN schedule had in fact decreased, and CHUM-supplied soap operas and movies (aside from a handful of weekend timeslots) were no longer present.

In September 1992, ASN launched a local version of Citytv's Breakfast Television, moving educational programs to the weekend and to overnight hours.

By 1996, as specialty television began to grow in popularity, Atlantic Pulse gave way to a short-lived scaled-back version called ATV Headline News.

ASN was also the original home of The Oprah Winfrey Show until it moved to ATV in 1991 and 11 years later on NTV in 2002 from St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador.

This appeared to be to maximize the network's simultaneous substitution coverage; since 1997, CTV Atlantic had aired series from the final hour of U.S. primetime earlier in the evening in order to accommodate newscasts at 11:00 p.m. AT.

This has included the first three seasons of Canadian Idol, which NTV began to carry in 2006, as well as sports programming such as CTV's coverage of the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Despite the then-pending CTVglobemedia/CHUM merger, CHUM content was actually lowered during the 2006–07 season compared to previous years, with other series from the CTV library – including repeats, "shelf" series like What About Brian, programming from MTV Canada, and timeshifted CTV programming for simsub purposes – making up the balance.

This has been grandfathered into the CRTC's current policy, which has required most newer large-market "twinsticks" to maintain separate programming and news content on both component stations.

[4] For several years, Rogers or Cable Atlantic aired scrolling text from Broadcast News in its place, and was faulted on several occasions for untimely malfunctions of the automated equipment that performed the deletion (i.e., entire segments of Canadian Idol being blocked).

[6] As part of the approval for Rogers's request to remove the commercial blackouts in St. John's, the channel also agreed not to solicit local advertising in that area either.