CJON-DT - History

History

In 1955, Newfoundland Broadcasting Company Ltd., owner of CJON radio (930 AM), applied for and received a licence for the first TV station in Newfoundland. Newfoundland Broadcasting was jointly owned by Geoff Stirling and Don Jamieson. The station went on-air later that year as a CBC Television affiliate. Stirling has contended that his was the only group willing to invest in such a station, although other sources have suggested that Stirling and Jamieson used their political connections to prevent the CBC from opening its own station in Newfoundland first. This scenario is somewhat unlikely because until 1958, the CBC was both the primary broadcast regulator in Canada and a broadcaster in its own right, the former role taken over in 1958 by the independent Board of Broadcast Governors (the forerunner of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission ). However, the CBC-owned CBYT in Corner Brook launched soon after, in 1959. When it opened, CJON's first studios and offices were located at the Prince of Wales Building in Buckmaster's Circle and the transmitter on Kenmount Road.

In any event, the CBC launched CBNT in 1964, and CJON-TV became an affiliate of the new CTV network. For a time it was known as NBC, for the "Newfoundland Broadcasting Company", until 1978 when WLBZ, the Bangor, Maine affiliate of the U.S.-based National Broadcasting Company, became available on cable (to be replaced later by WDIV from Detroit and WHDH-TV from Boston). To avoid confusion, CJON-TV was rebranded NTV.

In 1972, CJON-TV became one of the first TV stations in Canada, if not the first, to broadcast around the clock every night (see "Overnight programming", below).

In 1977, Stirling and Jamieson unwound their partnership, with Jamieson taking the AM radio stations, with CJON radio being renamed CJYQ. In later years, many of the AM stations were eventually sold, and in several cases shut down. Stirling kept NTV and the newly launched FM station CHOZ. 1983 saw NTV and OZ-FM's operations move to their present building on Logy Bay Road, with a new transmitter on the South Side Hills.

CJON was the only CTV affiliate not to participate in the network's 1993 restructuring from a cooperative to a corporation. However, it retained a nominal interest (less than 0.1 percent) until Baton Broadcasting bought controlling interest in the network in 1997.

NTV became available on C-Band satellite in 1994. The original purpose of this was to ensure that viewers in rural regions were able to receive the best signal possible. It also brought the station to Labrador for the first time. However, it became a popular choice for satellite viewers across the continent, as NTV's signal was unscrambled (free). The station began to make reference of its new coverage area in its promotions and branding; it adopted the "globe" logo it maintains today and modified its slogan to "Your Five-Star Satellite Network".

Due to issues involving program rights, it left C-Band in 1996. NTV eventually returned to C-Band, but as an encrypted digital signal which required an expensive (roughly $1500) receiver to decode. It also became available on the Bell TV and Shaw Direct DBS services, beginning in 1997. The increased audience reach on these services and through digital cable services - far beyond that in Newfoundland and Labrador alone – has led the station to brand itself, most recently, as "Canada's Superstation". Nonetheless, its reach pales in comparison to most specialty services, let alone the major broadcast networks.

Due to its location, some programs that NTV airs are first shown on this station before any other North American station airs them. This is signified with a "World Television Premiere" bumper that airs at the beginning of those programs - although, in the case of some syndicated programming, the bumper may be used simply to indicate that the program airs on CJON-TV before the local U.S. affiliate airs it. For instance, The Oprah Winfrey Show airs on NTV at 2:30 p.m. NT (18:00 UTC in winter, 17:00 UTC in summer; compared to 5:30 p.m. NT via WCVB-TV from Boston or WXYZ-TV from Detroit) and may hence be indicated as a "world premiere", although WLS-TV in Chicago, where Oprah is based, airs the program at 9:00 a.m. CT (11:30 a.m. NT).

NTV disaffiliated from CTV in 2002 in a dispute over affiliation terms. For most of its tenure as a CTV affiliate, NTV had aired the base 40-hour block of CTV programming, including national advertising, essentially for free since CTV paid NTV for the airtime. It then purchased rights to additional CTV programming for which NTV could sell all advertising. However, early in the 21st century (around 2001 and 2002), CTV tried to make NTV pay for the base 40-hour block as well, with no possibility of airtime payments, in a form of reverse compensation. CTV then raised rights fees for national CTV programming well beyond what Stirling and other NTV officials claimed they could pay. As a result, NTV officially became an independent station at the start of the 2002–03 television season. However, for all practical purposes, it is a Global affiliate except for news, which it still receives from CTV (see below).

NTV is not the only television station that lost its affiliation status with a major TV network and became independent in 2002. Other similar disaffiliations with U.S. stations occurred at that time in ways similar to that of NTV over contract disputes, both of which were longtime network affiliates for their given areas, and both of which became independent stations afterwards. The two stations are NBC affiliate KRON-TV in San Francisco and longtime CBS affiliate WJXT in Jacksonville, Florida. However, in 2006, KRON became the San Francisco Bay Area's affiliate of MyNetworkTV, then a television network owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and Twentieth Century Fox Television and now a television broadcast syndication service, and in 2010 took a secondary alternate NBC affiliation by airing selected NBC programming when the local owned-and-operated (O&O) NBC affiliate, KNTV (no relation to CJON-TV) in San Jose, cannot do so. A similar switch would later occur in 2009 when three stations of the now-defunct CH/E! system, CHCH-TV in Hamilton, Ontario, CJNT-TV in Montreal, and CHEK-TV in Victoria, British Columbia all went independent following the collapse of E! (Coincidentally, like CJON, CHEK was originally a CBC affiliate and later a CTV affiliate.)

The disaffiliation did, however, remove one major side effect of NTV's carriage of CTV programming. Whenever possible, NTV promoted its brand and removed any traces of CTV branding, despite the fact that it was a CTV affiliate. The large opaque bug that resulted, one specifically modified to cover the CTV logo during network time, was the subject of significant mocking and complaining by viewers. Other Canadian stations have routinely used opaque bugs themselves when airing programming through U.S. networks with which the station had no affiliation. However, NTV's bug was so bright that some viewers complained it could have "burned" into television screens, ruining them. NTV now uses opaque bugs only for some U.S. simulcasts, while the remaining CTV News broadcasts are now "co-branded" with both logos.