WPCH-TV - WPCH-TV in Canada

WPCH-TV in Canada

Peachtree TV is carried on most Canadian cable and satellite service providers, often as part of one of the main specialty tiers. The station was first made available in Canada in the 1980s (as WTBS), when the CRTC, Canada's telecommunications regulator, permitted Canadian service providers to carry the Atlanta station, and other U.S. superstations, as premium channels packaged with Canadian pay services, such as the services now known as The Movie Network or Movie Central. In late 1997, many service providers moved the station from pay service to a new third tier of specialty channels.

When WTBS became Peachtree TV, Canadian service providers were only permitted to continue carrying the Atlanta station, and not the TBS cable channel. The national TBS cable feed, which had split off from WTBS in the 1990s and which for a time was carried in place of that station by some Canadian service providers, was technically a separate channel and had never been formally approved by the CRTC as a substitute for the over-the-air Atlanta station. Indeed, in informing the CRTC of WTBS's change of call sign and branding, Turner Broadcasting apparently did not make any request to have the TBS cable channel approved in its place.

Peachtree TV continues to carry some of the same programs as TBS (albeit at different times), and hence some Canadians may have initially perceived Peachtree TV as either a renaming of, or equivalent to, the U.S. TBS service. However, WPCH does not carry flagship TBS programs such as Major League Baseball postseason coverage, or the talk show Conan, both of which are instead carried by other Canadian channels.

Since the rebranding, the channel has been removed from some cable providers due to carriage disputes with Turner, including Videotron (which removed the channel in 2009 but reinstated it in 2011), and Cogeco (which dropped it in 2011).