Canal i is a privately owned 24-news channel based in Caracas, Venezuela which can be seen over-the-air in the cities of Caracas, Maracaibo, and Barquisimeto on channels 57, 53, and 63 respectively. It was officially inaugurated on October 5, 2007.

Canal i was officially inaugurated on October 5, 2007, taking over the signal of the now defunct music channel, Puma TV. Canal i is a 24-hour news channel; its the fourth Venezuelan 24-hour news channel to be founded after Globovisión, Canal de Noticias, and TeleSUR. The president of Canal i, Wilmer Ruperti, invested $ 21 million in order to establish the network.

The idea to create Canal i dates back to 2004 when Ruperti purchased Puma TV, however, the project was delayed until 2006. Canal i aims to provide a fair and balanced news programming that does not have any political affiliations. Some of Canal i's presenters include Carlos Escarrá, a pro-Chávez congressperson and member of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, and Julio Borges, the leader of Justice First, the second largest opposition party.

Canals are man-made channels for water. There are two types of canal:

Canals are created in one of three ways, or a combination of the three, depending on available water and available path:

Smaller transportation canals can carry barges or narrowboats, while ship canals allow seagoing ships to travel to an inland port (e.g., Manchester Ship Canal), or from one sea or ocean to another (e.g., Caledonian Canal, Panama Canal).

At their simplest, canals consist of a trench filled with water. Depending on the stratum the canal passes through, it may be necessary to line the cut with some form of watertight material such as clay or concrete. When this is done with clay it is known as puddling.

Canals need to be level, and, while small irregularities in the lie of the land can be dealt with through cuttings and embankments, for larger deviations, other approaches have been adopted. The most common is the pound lock, which consists of a chamber within which the water level can be raised or lowered connecting either two pieces of canal at a different level or the canal with a river or the sea. When there is a hill to be climbed, flights of many locks in short succession may be used.

Wilmer Ruperti (born December 7, 1959) is a Venezuelan-born shipping business magnate. Since 2003, he has captured a major share of the market in physically exporting oil from Venezuela to the rest of Latin America, and has become one of Venezuela’s ric

Lloyd's List International described Ruperti in 2004 as a man who transformed himself from a shipping master into a leading player in Venezuela’s billion-dollar oil business, and that “everything Wilmer Ruperti touches appears to turn to gold”.

Ruperti’s career began in 1987 as a tanker master for Venezuelan oil company, Maraven, S.A., an industry affiliate of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA). He later studied shipping in Plymouth, England, before returning to Caracas, Venezuela, to set up his own small shipbroking firm.

Ruperti's big break in the shipping business came in late 2002 when he shipped gasoline to Venezuelan ports, using tankers chartered from Russia, during the Venezuelan general strike of 2002–2003, which featured a strike by thousands of employees at PDVSA.