Alabama Public Television

About Alabama Public Television

In 1953, at the urging of Governor Gordon Persons, the Alabama Legislature created the Alabama Educational Television Commission — a six-member board led by Birmingham educator Raymond Hurlbert. The Commission's unusual plan called for stations across the state to air identical programming fed from a central studio in Birmingham, since most of Alabama outside its three largest cities was too poor and rural to support standalone educational stations.

On January 7, 1955, the network's first broadcast went out from a transmitter atop Cheaha Mountain, Alabama's highest point — the nation's ninth non-commercial television station. Three months later, when WBIQ signed on in Birmingham on April 28, Alabama became the first state in the nation with an educational television network. The system became a model: some twenty-five other states copied Alabama's multi-transmitter approach. The network joined PBS upon its creation in 1969 and took the name Alabama Public Television in 1988.

Today APT operates nine digital transmitters reaching about 98 percent of Alabama, with offices and a network operations center in Birmingham, studios near Patterson Field in Montgomery, and a small studio in the Alabama State House. It pioneered microwave tower-to-tower signal relay and was the first station in Alabama to broadcast in high-definition digital. Its digital home is aptv.org.