The Channel
Its signal is transmitted from Mt. Dandenong and Como Centre, South Yarra, reaching much of the Greater Melbourne, Geelong and West Gippsland areas on free-to-air television .
The station began broadcasting officially on 6 October 1994. The Australian Broadcasting Authority had granted Melbourne Community Television Consortium (MCTC) with a temporary open-narrowcast license on 5 March 1993. The framework of community television in Australia can be traced back to 1992, when the Government asked the ABA to conduct a trial of community television using the vacant sixth television channel (Channel 31). On 30 July 2004, the Australian Broadcasting Authority granted the station a full-time community broadcasting licence.
C31 began broadcasting in digital during June 2010.
C31 is primarily funded through sponsorship, grants, sale of airtime and member donations. The station does not receive any regular Government funding. The annual revenue of C31 is approximately (AUD) $2 million per year. For comparison, the Nine Network, an Australian commercial station, has $907 million annual revenue. The station claims that "1.4 million Melbournians tune in each month" this figure is supplied by the ratings company OzTam. Individual programs can have ratings of up to 180,000 viewers.
The C31 website was completely remodelled in 2009, and now offers streaming of every program they broadcast (if the producer consents). C31 Melbourne is the only community television broadcast in Australia which offers this.
C31 announced to its digital service provider and officially began simulcasting from 2010 on Logical Channel Number 44. C31 officially started broadcasting in Digital during June 2010 with the official launch date on 11 June.
There are no plans for the expansion of community TV in Regional Victoria & Tasmania in the near future.
On 27 June 2010, the community TV programming was rebranded "C31" with new logo, identities, schedule and watermark.
The C31 program schedule is a program line-up is published on its website, in most Australian electronic program guides (EPG's) and in the newspapers.
On 1 March 2012, C31 ceased broadcasting its analogue signal, and is now available only as logical digital channel 44.
Read more about this topic: C31 Melbourne
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