CBC Television

CBC Television (also known as simply "CBC") is a Canadian broadcast television network that is owned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the national English-language public broadcaster (its French-language counterpart is Ici Radio-Canada Télé, which is operated by the CBC corporate entity's Société Radio-Canada division, and is headquartered in Montreal). The network began operations on September 6, 1952.

Headquartered in Toronto, CBC Television is available through over-the-air television stations across Canada, many of which are owned by the CBC. Almost all of the CBC's programming is produced in Canada. Although CBC Television is supported by public funding, commercial advertising revenue supplements the network, in contrast to CBC Radio and public broadcasters from several other countries, which are commercial-free.

Overview

CBC Television provides a complete 24-hour network schedule of news, sports, entertainment and children's programming; in most cases, feeding the same programming at the same local times nationwide, except to the Newfoundland Time Zone, where programs air 30 minutes "late".

CBC

CBC may refer to:

Media

Television in Canada

Television in Canada officially began with the sign-on of the nation's first television stations in Montreal and Toronto in 1952. As with most media in Canada, the television industry, and the television programming available in that country, are strongly influenced by media in the United States, perhaps to an extent not seen in any other major industrialized nation outside the U.S. As a result, the government institutes quotas for "Canadian content". Nonetheless, new content is often aimed at a broader North American audience, although the similarities may be less pronounced in the predominantly French-language province of Quebec.

History

Development of television

Television in Canada actually pre-dates any telecasts originating in the country, since thousands of television sets capable of receiving U.S.-based signals were installed in homes near the U.S. border between 1946 and 1953. Homes in southern and southwestern Ontario and portions of British Columbia, including the Toronto, Hamilton, London, Windsor, Victoria and Vancouver areas, were able to receive television stations from Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit or Seattle with the help of elevated outdoor antennas and amplifiers. U.S. television programs, and the networks that originated them, thus became popular in those Canadian cities within range of their signals – and those cities represented a sizable proportion of the total Canadian population. This helped spur development of a specifically Canadian television programming and transmission system during the late 1940s and early 1950s, but at the same time, caused it to develop within American technical standards previously mandated by the Federal Communications Commission between 1941 and 1946.

Canadian Television Fund

The Canadian Television Fund (CTF) supported the production and broadcast of Canadian television programs. On 1 April 2010, the Canadian Television Fund became the Canada Media Fund. A non-profit corporation operating as a public-private partnership, the CTF is financed by contributions from the Government of Canada through the Department of Canadian Heritage and the Canadian cable and direct-to-home satellite industries.

The CTF develops and implements policies to offer financial contributions to Canadian producers through specific program funding streams. At present, file administration of these programs is contracted to the Television Business Unit at Telefilm Canada.

Responsibilities

The Department of Canadian Heritage sets out objectives for the CTF within a Contribution Agreement. The main goal of the CTF is to support the creation and broadcast in peak viewing hours of high-quality Canadian television programs in both official languages in the genres of Drama, Children's and Youth, Documentary, and Variety and Performing Arts, and to build audiences for these programs.

Television

Television is a telecommunication medium used for transmitting sound with moving images in monochrome (black-and-white), or in colour, and in two or three dimensions. It can refer to a television set, a television program, or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium, for entertainment, education, news and advertising.

Television became available in crude experimental forms in the late 1920s. After World War II, an improved form became popular in the United States and Britain, and television sets became commonplace in homes, businesses, and institutions. During the 1950s, television was the primary medium for influencing public opinion. In the mid-1960s, color broadcasting was introduced in the US and most other developed countries. The availability of storage media such as VHS tape (1976), DVDs (1997), and high-definition Blu-ray Discs (2006) enabled viewers to watch recorded material such as movies. At the end of the first decade of the 2000s, digital television transmissions greatly increased in popularity. Another development was the move from standard-definition television (SDTV) (576i, with 576 interlaced lines of resolution and 480i) to high-definition television (HDTV), which provides a resolution that is substantially higher. HDTV may be transmitted in various formats: 1080p, 1080i and 720p. Since 2010, with the invention of smart television, Internet television has increased the availability of television programs and movies via the Internet through services such as Netflix, iPlayer, Hulu, Roku and Chromecast.