Tv Channel Frequencies

The wit and wisdom of Ted Rogers

Fifty years ago, most television programming made its way to people’s TV sets via rabbit ears. The newest mass communication technology—frequency modulation (FM) radio—was still struggling to catch on. And in Canada, the broadcasting business was dominated by the CBC. But in a few months in 1960 and 1961, a young lawyer, Ted Rogers, arrived on the scene and for the next five decades would radically shake up the media landscape, laying the groundwork for what would eventually become one of the world’s biggest communications companies.

In 1960, while still a law school student, Rogers and his then partner, media personality Joel Aldred, paid $85,000 to buy CHFI-FM, the first FM radio station in Canada. It was a bold venture, coming at a time when only five per cent of homes had FM radios. He also ventured into television broadcasting with a cold call from a law office library to media tycoon John Bassett. After wrangling a meeting for the next morning, the pair was soon pitching the Board of Broadcast governors (a precursor to the CRTC) for a licence to start the first private TV station in Toronto. In 1961, CFTO-TV hit the air, with Rogers as a minority owner. Those early forays into radio and television—marked by equal parts hard work, attitude and vision (and a little luck, of course)—would come to define the next several decades for the company, which has been celebrating its 50th anniversary over the past several months. “We were always trying to do the impossible,” Rogers wrote about the period in his book, Relentless .