CITY-TV

From Free net encyclopedia

In accordance with Wikipedia convention for articles on television stations, this article is titled with the station's official government-assigned call sign. There is a separate article on the Citytv brand.

CITY-TV (Citytv Toronto) is a television station based in Toronto, Ontario. Owned by CHUM Limited, it is Canada's third-oldest UHF television station and the flagship station of the Citytv system.

Broadcasting for the first time on September 28, 1972, CITY was best known for its unconventional approach to news and local programming, an approach that continues today and has carried over to the other stations in the Citytv system. (See Citytv for more on these practices.)

Originally owned by Channel Seventy-Nine Ltd., a group which consisted of Phyllis Switzer, Moses Znaimer, Jerry Grafstein, Edgar Cowan and others, CITY was in debt by 1975. Multiple Access Ltd. (the owners of CFCF in Montreal, Quebec) purchased 45% of the station. Three years later, it sold its stake to CHUM. CITY was purchased outright by CHUM in 1981 with the sale of Moses Znaimer's interest in the station. Znaimer would remain with the station as an executive.

From 1972 until 1975, working at Toronto's Second City, Dan Aykroyd moonlighted as CITY-TV's announcer until he moved to New York City to join Saturday Night Live.

CITY originally broadcast on the UHF band with a 31 kW signal on channel 79, since all the VHF licences in the Toronto area were taken. In 1976, the station began broadcasting at 208 kW from the CN Tower. The channel CITY broadcast on was changed from channel 79 to channel 57 on July 1, 1983, due to complaints that the station was interfering with mobile radio in the Toronto area, and so that channels 70 to 83 could be reclaimed for use by new AMPS mobile phones in the Americas. On September 1, 1986, a transmitter was put into operation in Woodstock, Ontario, and another was set up in Ottawa, Ontario in 1996. Image:CityTV Building.JPG CITY was also the first digital television station in Canada using the ATSC. It is still continuing its analogue broadcasts, and the CRTC has made digital service completely voluntary. The signal was first broadcast on January 16, 2003, and became a regular signal on March 3 of that same year.

In 1987 CITY (along with all of the other CHUM-owned television stations) moved to its current headquarters at the CHUM-City Building, making it one of the most recognizable landmarks in the city.

For almost thirty years, CITY was the only Citytv station in Canada (therefore making Citytv and CITY interchangeable names for the station). In 2001, however, Citytv became a two-station system when CHUM purchased Vancouver's CKVU from Global. In 2005, three more Citytv stations were added in Calgary, Edmonton and Winnipeg after CHUM purchased the A-Channel television stations owned by Craig Media. On the day the three Prairie Citytv stations signed on, the flagship "CityPulse" newscast was rebranded "CityNews."

Some cablesystems in Canada, such as Videotron in Montreal, carry CITY as a superstation.

[edit]