Despite rumours, the Yorkton CTV station, CICC, will not be shutting down. At least not in the near future.
"I can say, there are no immediate plans to shutdown Yorkton," said Anika Malik, manager of corporate communications for Bellmedia, CTV's parent company.
She declined to answer whether the station is under review, however. "That's really the most information I have at this time," she said.
In April, CBC reported that CICC was one of six local CTV affiliates that were potentially on the chopping block. The article cited lack of profits for the station being at risk.
Another CTV spokesperson, Matthew Almeida, suggested the confusion may have stemmed from a Canadian Radio-television and Telecom-munications Commission (CRTC) hearing regarding its $106 million fund supporting local programming. Cable and satellite companies fund the program through mandatory contributions. They have applied to discontinue their contributions.
During the hearing, Mirko Bibic, senior vice-president of regulatory affairs for CTV and Bell warned regulators that reducing or discontinuing the fund could jeopardize local stations, among them Yorkton.
"We won't continue to fund chronically unprofitable stations, tiny stations in tiny little towns," Bibic said.
Rumours of a CTV shutdown were recently exacerbated by the blackout of CKOS, Yorkton's CBC affiliate. For the past month, CICC has been inundated with calls from antenna subscribers following the discontinuation of CBC's analogue signal. The local CBC broadcast went off the air on July 31.
The national broadcaster set up an information line (888 303 5172) blaming federal funding cuts, the CRTC's 2008 ruling to phase out non-digital broadcasting and the rising difficulty and expense of maintaining its analogue repeaters.
Not all stations were required to make the transition to digital-only transmission, including CKOS, but many chose to do so anyway. CBC's information line recording suggests analogue users who wish to continue receiving CBC switch to cable, satellite or high speed Internet.
CTV Yorkton is now the only station available to antenna subscribers locally.
