| Montreal, Quebec | |
|---|---|
| City of license | Montreal, Quebec |
| Branding | Global Montreal |
| Channels | Digital: 15 (UHF) Virtual: 15.1 (PSIP) |
| Translators | see below |
| Affiliations | Global |
| Owner | Shaw Media (Shaw Television Limited Partnership) |
| First air date | March 17, 1957 (in Quebec City; moved to Montreal in 2009) |
| Former callsigns | CKMI-TV (1957-2009) CKMI-TV-1 (2009-2011) |
| Former channel number(s) | 5 (Analog, 1957-1997, Quebec City) 46 (Analog, 1997-2011, Montreal) |
| Former affiliations | CBC (1957-1997) |
| Transmitter power | 8 kW |
| Height | 298 m |
| Website | Global Montreal |
CKMI-DT-1 (branded as Global Montreal) is the Global Television Network owned-and-operated station in Quebec.
Originally a privately owned CBC Television affiliate in Quebec City, the station moved most of its operations to Montreal in 1997 after launching a rebroadcaster there and becoming a Global affiliate as Global Quebec. This was made official in 2009 when the Montreal rebroadcaster became its primary transmitter and city of license.[1]
The station is owned by Shaw Media. In 2009 its main production facilities and news operations relocated from a building shared with French language network TVA on De Maisonneuve Boulevard East in Montreal to the Dominion Square Building, home of The Gazette in Downtown Montreal.
Contents |
The station was founded in 1957 on VHF channel 5 as the second privately owned station in Quebec, co-owned by Télévision de Québec along with the province's first private station, CFCM-TV. Its studios were located alongside CFCM's facilities in Sainte-Foy, then a suburb of Quebec City. Télévision de Québec was a consortium of cinema chain Famous Players and Quebec City's three privately-owned radio stations, CHRC, CKCV and CJQC. It immediately became Quebec City's CBC Television affiliate, taking all English programming from CFCM. In 1964, following the opening of CBVT, CFCM disaffiliated from Radio-Canada (the French language arm of the CBC) and joined the loose association of independent stations that evolved into TVA, while CKMI remained with CBC.
Télévision de Québec was nearly forced to sell its stations in 1969 due to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission's (CRTC) new rules requiring radio and television stations to be 80% Canadian-owned. The largest shareholder, Famous Players, was a subsidiary of American film studio Paramount Pictures. Eventually, Famous Players reduced its shares to 20% by 1971, allowing Télévision de Québec to keep CKMI and CFCM.[2] The company renamed itself Télé-Capitale in 1974.
CKMI and CFCM were bought by Pathonic in 1979, and then by Télé-Metropole (which changed its name to TVA) in 1989. For many years, CKMI was known on-air as "MI-5."
CKMI faced severe financial problems for much of its history as a CBC affiliate, in large part because the area's anglophone population was just barely large enough for the station to be viable as a privately-owned CBC affiliate. (Quebec City, unlike Montreal, is a virtually monolingual francophone city.) For most of its first 40 years on the air, it stayed afloat only because of the revenues from CFCM, long the dominant station in Quebec City. Much of its viewership came from anglophone members of the National Assembly and anglophone provincial government employees. For many years, its only newscast was a five-minute update, as its viewership was deemed too small to justify having a full-fledged news department.
It began airing Global shows in the 1980s, and was picked up by most cable systems in Montreal as a result. By 1992, however, growing financial trouble forced CKMI to drop all non-CBC programming and become a de facto repeater of Montreal's CBC O&O, CBMT. It also carried CBMT's newscasts, though CKMI aired its own five-minute newscast, Inside Quebec, before CBMT's Newswatch on weeknights.
Relief did not come until 1997, when TVA sold controlling interest in the station to Izzy Asper's Canwest, while retaining 49% interest. TVA and Canwest formed a joint venture that assumed ownership of CKMI and disaffiliated the station from CBC, making it a Global station. As part of the deal, CKMI moved to from channel 5 to channel 20 from a transmitter at the Quebec City tower farm atop Mount Bélair. The CBC took over CKMI's old transmitter and site in Sainte-Foy and used it to set up CBVE-TV, a full-time repeater of CBMT (following the digital transition in 2011, the station relocated to channel 11, using CBVT's old analogue frequency and transmitter atop Mount Bélair). CKMI then added semi-satellites in Montreal and Sherbrooke. The purchase of CKMI gave Canwest's stations enough coverage of Canada that shortly after the deal was closed, it rebranded all its stations as the Global Television Network. In 2002, Global bought out TVA's remaining interest in CKMI.
The station shifted focus of its operations, as well as the focus of its news coverage, to Montreal soon after the launch of the Montreal transmitter. It also began sending its signal to the Montreal transmitter first. However, until 2009 the station remained licensed to Quebec City, and its "official" main studio remained in Sainte-Foy. CKMI is Global's only former CBC station never owned by WIC.
CKMI's financial situation has not improved much since joining Global, though in recent years it has waged a spirited battle with CBMT for second place behind long-dominant CFCF-TV. It has been argued that the station's poor financial performance was due to Canwest not being able to sell local advertising in Montreal, home to almost three-fourths of the province's anglophones. This is because CKMI was officially classed as a "regional" station, even though for all intents and purposes it has been a Montreal station ever since moving to Global. However, when the station moved its city of license to Montreal in 2009, it gained local advertising rights in Montreal for the first time.[1] It also rebranded from "Global Quebec" to "Global Montreal". This is in response of CJNT Montreal sold to Channel Zero that same year upon the demise of the E! system.
As part of a number of cutbacks to Global operations across the country, Canwest closed the station's Sherbrooke bureau and halved the number of employees working at the Quebec City bureau in February 2008. Sherbrooke is now covered by reporters based at the Montreal and Quebec City bureaus.
The station also aired programming from The Score such as WWE Raw until the fall of 2009.
Global Montreal currently airs a half-hour newscast at 6 p.m. (titled Evening News) and an hour-long newscast at 11 p.m. (titled News Final) seven days a week. The Saturday evening edition of News Final is shortened to a half-hour to allow the broadcast of Saturday Night Live. Global also airs a half-hour program called Focus Montreal, looking at the events in Montreal during the past week. CKMI-DT is currently the largest Global owned-and-operated station in Canada that does not carry local newscasts on weekday or weekend mornings, or at noon or 5 p.m. on weekdays.
Along with a number of other Global stations, Global Quebec introduced a Greenscreen virtual studio in 2008. The cameras, lighting and reports are remotely controlled (like other regional Global news studios) from Global's broadcast centre in Edmonton. A number of Montreal-based employees were made redundant with the introduction of this technology, however all Global Montreal anchors are still based out of Montreal.
Meteorologist Anthony Farnell is no longer based in Montreal with CKMI, and presents weather forecasts remotely for CKMI from the studios of sister station CIII-TV in Toronto; other than Farnell, Global Montreal does not have any other meteorologists on-staff nor does it operate a sports department.
On August 29, 2011, Global Montreal began broadcasting their local newscasts in 16:9 widescreen standard definition.
Anchors
Weather
Reporters
After being rebranded as Global, the station aired a live two and a half hour (and subsequently three) hour morning magazine program from Montreal called This Morning Live, hosted by Andrew Peplowski and Tracy McKee. It was aired in place of cartoons that aired on most Global stations in the morning because Quebec provincial law requires children's programming to be shown commercial-free over the air. A side benefit of this was that it added enough Canadian content to the station's schedule that it could air American talk shows in the afternoon.
This Morning Live was last cancelled in late 2007 and the last program was broadcast on February 27, 2008. News Final, which had been off air due to low ratings since June 2006, but was brought back after This Morning Live was canceled to help maintain the number of locally produced broadcast hours.
As part of Shaw's offer to take over Canwest's television assets, Shaw Communications is promising to launch local morning newscasts on several Global stations, including Global Montreal. However, it has not been announced when the new Global Montreal morning newscasts will launch.
An evening lifestyle program that suffered poor ratings and was succeeded by Global News @ 5:30.
A weekly program covering the week's news in Quebec City; cancelled when the Quebec City bureau was scaled down in 2007.
Semi-satellites are in bold italics
| Station | City of licence | Digital channel | ERP | HAAT | Transmitter Coordinates |
| CKMI-DT | Quebec City | 20 (UHF) | 18 kW | 446.3 m | |
| CKMI-DT-2 | Sherbrooke | 11 (VHF) | 1.0 kW | 613.1 m |
In August 2011, CKMI converted all three of its transmitters to digital. CKMI-DT-2 Sherbrooke began broadcasting on August 10, CKMI-DT Quebec City started broadcasting on August 13, and CKMI-DT-1 Montreal started broadcasting on August 17. The deadline to convert to digital in these markets was August 31.
|
||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||