While XHAS began operations in 1981, its history stretched back to the late 1960s. In March 1968, Mario Rincón Espinosa, the head of Tele Nacional, S.A., requested and received a concession to build a UHF station in Tijuana. At this time, the callsign XHAS-TV and channel number 33 were assigned, with a visual effective radiated power of 105 kW. With the technical parameters set, Tele Nacional set out to build the station, and after some delays, it submitted the technical details in 1970. The next year, Rincón Espinosa was granted authorization to cut power in half; on several occasions in 1976, the
Secretariat of Communications and Transportation (SCT) reached out to seek revised technical information and was not given a response. In July 1978, the
Diario Oficial ran a notification warning that the SCT would begin an administrative proceeding to revoke the concession. The station first signed on the air in the fall of 1981 after receiving a new concession that September. It originally operated as a rebroadcaster of
Televisa's
XEW television for all but two hours a day, when it aired a limited slate of Mexican movies and independent programs. In 1985, XHAS began to air a local newscast titled . It subcontracted a company, Logovisión, to produce the program, which got viewers' attention for its independence—and Televisa's attention for allegedly disrespecting Mexican institutions. was regarded as more unbiased in its coverage than Televisa's newscasts; it beat
XEWT's news in local surveys and reported news of voting irregularities in the 1989 Baja California gubernatorial elections. Televisa retaliated by pulling programs from the XHAS local block, the only time when it could sell its own advertising. The station began taking programs from
Imevisión to fill the local window instead. In September 1990, given the uneasy state of relations between station and network, XHAS switched its affiliation to the U.S.-based Spanish-language network
Telemundo; the newscast moved from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. as a result of the changes. The Telemundo affiliation switch also resulted in a letter from the SCT, asking it to explain its "arbitrary" affiliation change. In December 1994, new management at XHAS fired the team and built their own news department; after five months on local radio, moved to
XHJK and Televisión Azteca, where it remained for eight years. Entravision acquired operating control in 2000, resulting in a lawsuit from Telemundo, which claimed it had
right of first refusal and wanted to purchase the outlet for $30 million. A weekday 6 p.m. newscast launched in 2002. XHAS carried 109 Spanish-language telecasts of the
San Diego Padres in the 2005 season. In January 2017, NBC announced that it was hiring people for
KNSD with the intention of launching a new Telemundo O&O station in San Diego, replacing XHAS-TDT (whose affiliation expired on June 30, 2017). Telemundo programming moved to a subchannel of KNSD (now
KUAN-LD) on July 1, 2017, at midnight. At the same time, XHAS became an affiliate of
Azteca América; the network, which had been affiliated with
KZSD-LP, was carried on a subchannel of sister station XHDTV-TDT from March 15, 2017, until XHAS joined the network. It was announced in October 2022 that Intermedia, owner of
XHILA-TDT in
Mexicali, would take over programming for the station on November 2, to be called "Canal 33". In 2023,, XHAS-TDT became an affiliate of
Estrella TV. ==Technical information==