: ''In accordance with Wikipedia convention for articles on television stations, this article is titled with the station's official government-assigned
Call Sign . There is a separate article on the
Citytv brand.''
('''Citytv Toronto''') is a
Television Station based in
Toronto, Ontario . Owned by
CHUM Limited , it is
Canada 's third-oldest
UHF television station and the flagship station of the
Citytv system.
Broadcasting for the first time on
September 28 ,
1972 , CITY was best known for its unconventional approach to news and local programming, an approach that continues today and has carried over to the other stations in the Citytv system. ''(See
Citytv for more on these practices.)''
Originally owned by Channel Seventy-Nine Ltd., a group which consisted of Phyllis Switzer,
Moses Znaimer ,
Jerry Grafstein , Edgar Cowan and others, CITY was in debt by
1975 . Multiple Access Ltd. (the owners of
CFCF in
Montreal, Quebec ) purchased 45% of the station. Three years later, it sold its stake to CHUM. CITY was purchased outright by CHUM in
1981 with the sale of Moses Znaimer's interest in the station. Znaimer would remain with the station as an executive.
From
1972 until
1975 , working at Toronto's
Second City ,
Dan Aykroyd moonlighted as CITY-TV's announcer until he moved to
New York City to join ''
Saturday Night Live ''.
CITY originally
Broadcast on the UHF band with a 31
KW Signal on channel 79, since all the
VHF licences in the Toronto area were taken. In
1976 , the station began broadcasting at 208 kW from the
CN Tower . The channel CITY broadcast on was changed from channel 79 to channel 57 on
July 1 ,
1983 , due to complaints that the station was
Interfering with mobile radio in the Toronto area, and so that channels 70 to 83 could be reclaimed for use by new
AMPS Mobile Phone s in the
Americas . On
September 1 ,
1986 , a transmitter was put into operation in
Woodstock, Ontario , and another was set up in
Ottawa, Ontario in
1996 .
CITY was also the first
Digital Television station in Canada, using the
ATSC DTV standard. It is still continuing its
Analogue broadcasts, and the CRTC has made digital service completely voluntary. The signal was first broadcast on
January 16 ,
2003 , and became a regular signal on
March 3 of that same year.
In
1987 CITY (along with all of the other CHUM-owned television stations) moved to its current headquarters at the
CHUM-City Building , making it one of the most recognizable landmarks in the city.
For almost thirty years, CITY was the only Citytv station in Canada (therefore making Citytv and CITY interchangeable names for the station). In
2001 , however, Citytv became a two-station system when CHUM purchased
Vancouver 's
CKVU from
Global . In 2005, three more Citytv stations were added in
Calgary ,
Edmonton and
Winnipeg after CHUM purchased the
A-Channel television stations owned by Craig Media. On the day the three Prairie Citytv stations signed on, the flagship "CityPulse" newscast was rebranded "
CityNews ."
Some cablesystems in Canada, such as
Videotron in
Montreal , carry CITY as a
Superstation .
