Global Television Network
The Global Television Network is a Canadian English-language terrestrial television network. It is currently Canada's second most-watched private terrestrial television network after CTV, and has fifteen owned-and-operated stations throughout the country. Global is owned by Corus Entertainment — the media holdings of JR Shaw and other members of his family.
Global has its origins in a regional television station of the same name, serving Southern Ontario, which launched in 1974. The Ontario station was soon purchased by the now-defunct CanWest Global Communications, and that company gradually expanded its national reach in the subsequent decades through both acquisitions and new station launches, building up a quasi-network of independent stations, known as the CanWest Global System, until the stations were unified under the Ontario station's branding in 1997.
History
NTV
The network has its origins in NTV, a new network first proposed in 1966 by Hamilton media proprietor Ken Soble, the co-founder and owner of independent station CHCH-TV through his Niagara Television company. Financially backed by Power Corporation of Canada, Soble submitted a brief to the Board of Broadcast Governors in 1966 proposing a national satellite-fed network. Under the plan, Soble's company would launch Canada's first broadcast satellite and would use it to relay the programming of CHCH to 96 new transmitters across Canada. Soble died in December of that year; his widow, Frances, took over as president of Niagara Television, while former CTV executive Michael Hind-Smith and Niagara Television vice-president Al Bruner handled the network application. Soble had originally formulated the plan after failing in a bid to acquire CTV.The original proposal was widely criticized on various grounds, including claims that it exceeded the board's concentration of media ownership limits and that it was overly ambitious and financially unsustainable. As well, it failed to include any plan for local news content on any of its individual stations beyond possibly the metropolitan Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver markets.
By 1968, NTV put forward its first official licence application, under which the original 96 transmitters would be supplemented by 43 more transmitters to distribute a separate French-language service, along with provisions for the free distribution of CBC Television, Radio-Canada, and a new noncommercial educational television service on the network's satellite. Transponder space would also be leased to CTV and Télé-Métropole, but as competing commercial services, they would not have been granted the free distribution rights the plan offered to the public television services. However, after federal communications minister Paul Hellyer announced plans to move forward with the publicly owned Anik series of broadcast satellites through Telesat Canada instead of leaving the rollout of satellite technology in the hands of private corporations, Power Corporation backed out of the application and left NTV in limbo.
Global Communications
Bruner was fired from Niagara Television in 1969, purportedly because his efforts to rescue the network application were leading him to neglect his other duties with the company's existing media operations. He then put together another investment team to form Global Communications, which carried the network application forward thereafter. By 1970, the Canadian Radio and Television Commission had put out a formal call for "third" stations in several major cities. Global Communications put forward a revised application under which the network would launch with transmitters only in Ontario, as an interim step toward the eventual buildout of the entire network originally envisioned by Soble. Because Niagara Television and CHCH were no longer involved in the proposal, the 1970 application also requested a licence to launch a new station in Toronto as the chain's flagship.The network licence was approved by the CRTC on July 21, 1972. The group was granted a six-transmitter network in Southern Ontario, stretching from Windsor to Ottawa. They had also sought a seventh transmitter in Maxville that could reach Montreal, but were turned down because of a CRTC moratorium on new English stations in the Montreal market. The transmitters would all be fed from a central studio in Toronto. The group promised a high level of Canadian content and agreed not to accept local advertising.
The station's initial plan was to broadcast only during prime time hours from 5 p.m. to midnight, while leasing daytime hours to the Ontario Educational Communications Authority to broadcast educational programming. However, the offer never came to fruition, with the OECA opting instead to expand what would eventually become TVOntario by launching its own transmitters.
The new Global Television Network, with the callsign CKGN-TV, launched on January 6, 1974, from studios located at a former factory in the Don Mills neighbourhood in North York at 6 p.m. local time. Global remains based there today. Although the Ontario station has always been based in Toronto, its main transmitter was licensed to Paris, Ontario; halfway between Kitchener-Waterloo and Hamilton, transmitting on Channel 6, until 2009. Repeating transmitters were originally located near Windsor, Ontario on Channel 22; Sarnia, Channel 29, Uxbridge, Ontario on Channel 22, to serve the metro Toronto area; Bancroft, on Channel 2; and Hull, Quebec, to cover the Ottawa area, on Channel 6.
Launch
Global's original prime time schedule included Patrick Watson's documentary series Witness to Yesterday, Pierre Berton's political debate show The Great Debate, a Canadian edition of Bernard Braden's British consumer affairs newsmagazine The Braden Beat, William Shatner's film talk show Flick Flack, Sunday night Toronto Toros hockey games and a nightly variety series called Everything Goes, as well as a few imported American series, including Chopper One, Dirty Sally, and Doc Elliot. In March, the station drew a formal complaint from MP James McGrath against its airing of the 1969 Western film Heaven with a Gun, as the film featured scenes of violence that McGrath considered inappropriate.The station ran into a financial crisis within just three months. Due to the CRTC decision, it was forced to launch at midseason. Many companies had already allocated their advertising budgets for the season and had little money left to buy time on the newly minted network, and even some of the advertisers who had booked time on the network backed out in light of the 1973 oil crisis. In addition, the short-lived American adoption of year-round daylight saving time in January 1974 and the Ontario government's refusal to follow suit had unexpectedly forced Everything Goes, promoted as the network's flagship show, into airing directly opposite The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and thus attracting disastrous ratings. As a result of the crisis, the station quickly lost access to its line of credit.
Unable to meet daily expenses, Global initially approached potential bidders, including Channel Seventynine, Denison Mines, Standard Broadcasting, and the Jim Pattison Group, and was soon bailed out by IWC Communications, owned by broadcaster Allan Slaight, and Global Ventures Western Ltd., a syndicate that included Winnipeg movie theatre owner Paul Morton and Izzy Asper, a Manitoba politician turned broadcaster. Asper's company, CanWest Capital, was in the process of obtaining the licence for what would become CKND-TV in Winnipeg, which planned to carry some of Global's programs under a syndication deal.
1970s–1990s
In the spring of 1974, Global cancelled a significant number of its scheduled programs. By that fall, it was obvious that Global's original model was unsustainable, and it was forced to pick up a large amount of American programming to fill in the gaps. With American imports filling as much of the schedule as Canadian content rules would allow, Global had effectively become "another CTV." With the exception of the nightly newscasts, few other Canadian-produced programs remained on the station, and the ones that did exist were largely criticized as cheaply produced filler. John Spalding, the station's original program director, quit in 1975 after being unable to convince the station's owners to invest more money into higher-quality production. To replace him, the company recruited programmer Bill Stewart away from CKCO-TV, Kitchener. Stewart's savvy program purchases in the ensuing years were largely credited with keeping the network viable while its viewership grew. The company enhanced its senior talent pool in 1979 with the arrival of sales guru Dave Mintz, formerly of KVOS-TV, as the network's president, a post he held until his retirement in 1993, taking Global from the lowest-rated station in Toronto to the ratings leader along the way. Over several years, the prime late evening newscast shifted between 10 and 11 p.m. and between 30 and 60 minutes. CKGN changed its callsign to CIII-TV in 1984, deferring to its widespread CATV distribution on Cable 3.Asper bought a controlling interest in 1985, making him the first western-based owner of a major Canadian broadcaster. In 1989, Asper and Morton tried to buy each other out, a struggle that was resolved in favour of Asper and Canwest.
For its first decade, the network remained restricted to its six-transmitter chain in Ontario. However, soon after Asper bought controlling interest in Global, he seemed eager to grow his chain of stations into a third national network. He started by launching CFRE-DT in Regina and CFSK-DT in Saskatoon, and winning a legal battle for CKVU-DT in Vancouver during the second half of the 1980s. He also acquired the fledgling CIHF-DT in Halifax in the early 1990s. Canwest's stations now reached seven of Canada's ten provinces. The Canwest stations purchased many of their programs collectively, and consequently had similar—although not identical—broadcast schedules. They did not share common branding, however—although stations were sometimes indicated as being part of the "CanWest Global System" as a secondary brand, throughout the 1980s and early 1990s they each retained their own branding and continued to function as an ownership group of independent stations rather than as a fully unified network.
File:Old Global TV Logo.svg|left|thumb|150px|The second logo of Global, which debuted with its formal rebranding as a national network. The crescent motif was also used on the logos of other Canwest properties such as CH, Prime, and Mystery TV, and is still featured on DejaView's logo.
In 1997, Canwest bought a controlling interest in the CBC affiliate in Quebec City, CKMI-TV, from TVA, which retained a 49% interest until 2002. With the acquisition of CKMI, Canwest now had enough coverage of Canada that it seemed logical to rebrand its station group as a network. Accordingly, on August 18, 1997, Canwest scrubbed all local branding from its stations and rebranded them as the "Global Television Network," the brand previously used solely by the Ontario outlet. On the same day, CKMI disaffiliated from CBC, set up rebroadcasters in Montreal and Sherbrooke, and became the Quebec outlet of the newly minted network. It also built a new studio in Montreal and moved most of its operations there, though the licence nominally remained in Quebec City until 2009. Canwest's acquisition of CKMI expanded Global's reach to eight of Canada's 10 largest markets, with only rebroadcasters serving Ottawa and Montreal.
Even so, Global was still not a fully national network, as it did not have stations in Calgary and Edmonton. The CRTC turned down bids by Canwest for stations in those cities in the 1980s. As a result, Global continued its long-standing secondary affiliations in those cities on independent stations CICT-TV and CITV-TV, respectively. Similarly, Global lacked a full-time station in St. John's, where Global programming was carried by longtime CTV affiliate CJON-TV.