History
Frank Griffiths established Western Broadcasting Company Ltd. in the late 1950s to hold his various broadcasting assets in British Columbia, including radio station CKNW and a majority interest in BCTV, at the time the province's CTV affiliate. WBC was publicly-traded for a time but was later reacquired by Griffiths's family.
In 1982, the Griffiths' media assets were again floated on the public markets in a restructured form via WIC. The Griffiths retained Western Broadcasting, which in turn held all of WIC's Class A voting shares; the Class B shares were sold to the public. Class B shares did not generally provide voting rights, but would be converted to voting shares should a majority of Class A shares change hands, a so-called coat-tail provision.
Over time, WIC would acquire various broadcasting assets from other companies, including Selkirk Communications – the other major shareholder of BCTV, and also the owner of independent stations CHCH-TV Hamilton and CFAC-TV (now CICT-TV) Calgary – as well as Charles Allard's company Allarcom, which had launched CITV-TV Edmonton and pay television service Superchannel. Its final major acquisition was Montreal's CFCF-TV, which it bought in 1997.
Read more about this topic: Western International Communications
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Every member of the family of the future will be a producer of some kind and in some degree. The only one who will have the right of exemption will be the mother ...”
—Ruth C. D. Havens, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)