Re: New VHF in Toronto?

[Scott Fybush <scott@fybush.com>]

At 09:11 PM 6/9/2003 -0400, you wrote:
> > Of course, nobody will watch Toronto One on channel 52, or know that the
>
>Wait a minute -- what about those of us with portable TV sets _NOT_ hooked
>up to a CATV feed?

Ever seen the cable penetration figures for Toronto? The most recent 
numbers I saw were over 80 percent of households, which is a number any US 
cable company would drool over - and that doesn't include satellite 
households, both legal (Bell ExpressVu and Star Choice) and grey-market 
(Dish, DirecTV). I think it dates back to the fifties, when over-the-air 
service was limited to CBLT, channel 9 and a weak signal from CHCH, channel 
11, that duplicated much of CBLT's programming anyway. Cable gave Toronto 
(and the rest of Canada) access to all those US signals, a powerful 
marketing tool indeed.

So "nobody" may be an overstatement...but I'd bet that almost no 
non-radio-geek Torontonians would know to look for CFMT on 47 or CITY on 57 
or so on! CITY, when it launched on channel 79 in 1972, intentionally put 
up the weakest signal it could get away with (something like a kilowatt of 
visual ERP from a relatively low tower at Yonge and Bloor), just enough to 
get to the cable headend.

The last Toronto-market stations to use their OTA channel numbers as part 
of their branding were CFTO 9 and CFMT 47, and both retired those brands in 
favor of call-letters-only by the early nineties. Newer services, like CJMT 
44 ("Omni.2") and CITS 36 ("Cornerstone" or "CTS") almost never make 
reference to their OTA dial position.

s