independent
Independent or Independents may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Artist groups
* Independents (artist group), a group of modernist painters based in the New Hope, Pennsylvania, area of the United States during the early 1930s
* Independ ...
television station
A television station is a set of equipment managed by a business, organisation or other entity, such as an amateur television (ATV) operator, that transmits video content and audio content via radio waves directly from a transmitter on the earth ...
Ahuntsic
Ahuntsic (; French pronunciation ) is a district in the northern part of Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Originally an independent village, Ahuntsic was first annexed by Montreal in 1910, then merged into the borough of Ahuntsic-Cartierville in 2002. ...
district, at the home of the family's production company Mi-Cam Communications. Its transmitter is located at
Mount Royal Park
Mount Royal (french: link=no, Mont Royal, ) is a large intrusive rock hill or small mountain in the city of Montreal, immediately west of Downtown Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The best-known hypothesis for the origin of the name Montreal is the hi ...
, near
Downtown Montreal
Downtown Montreal ( French: ''Centre-Ville de Montréal'') is the central business district of Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
The district is situated on the southernmost slope of Mount Royal, and occupies the western portion of the borough of Vil ...
.
CFHD-DT, which operates under the branding ICI Montreal (a bilingual abbreviation of "International Channel/Canal International"), is a ''de facto'' successor to
CJNT
CJNT-DT (channel 62) is a television station in Montreal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, part of the Citytv network. owned-and-operated station, Owned and operated by network parent Rogers Sports & Media, the station maintains studios inside the Roge ...
; the station had started as a multicultural station, but its ethnic output decreased significantly in favor of commercial, English-language programming after it was sold to
Western International Communications
WIC Western International Communications Ltd. (or WIC) was a Canadian media company that operated from 1982 to 2000, with operations including broadcast and specialty television, radio, and satellite distribution via a majority interest in Can ...
(WIC), and in turn,
Canwest
Canwest Global Communications Corporation, which operated under the corporate name Canwest, was a major Canadian media conglomerate based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, with its head offices at Canwest Place. It held radio, television broadcasting an ...
and Channel Zero. ICI was announced in parallel with a proposal by
Rogers Media
Rogers Media Inc., operating as Rogers Sports & Media, is a Canadian subsidiary of Rogers Communications that owns the company's mass media and sports properties, such as the Citytv and Omni Television terrestrial television stations, Sportsnet, ...
to purchase CJNT (which had since affiliated with its
Citytv
Citytv is a Canadian television network owned by the Rogers Sports & Media subsidiary of Rogers Communications. The licence of the original Citytv station, granted the callsign of CITY-TV by the CRTC on November 25, 1971 to Cable Television Ass ...
network) and change its license to make it a conventional, English language station. Both Rogers and Channel Zero also planned to provide resources to the new channel. As part of
Omni Regional
Omni Television (stylized as OMNI Television) is a Canadian television system and specialty channel owned by Rogers Sports & Media, a subsidiary of Rogers Communications. It currently consists of all six of Canada's conventional multicultural ...
—a distribution of Omni Television stations as a must-carry specialty channel, the network is fed province-wide as ICI Quebec.
History
Prior to the founding of ICI, Sam Norouzi's father produced a Persian program for Télévision Ethnique du Québec (TEQ), a cable access channel that was the precursor to CJNT, which went on the air in 1997. CJNT was sold to WIC in 1999, and became owned by Canwest as a CH/E! station when Canwest bought WIC in 2001. Canwest in turn sold the station to Channel Zero in 2009. Over the years, the station's commitment to producing local ethnic programming declined. When it was owned by Channel Zero, it didn't produce any such programming at all.
On May 3, 2012,
Rogers Media
Rogers Media Inc., operating as Rogers Sports & Media, is a Canadian subsidiary of Rogers Communications that owns the company's mass media and sports properties, such as the Citytv and Omni Television terrestrial television stations, Sportsnet, ...
announced its intent to acquire CJNT, with plans to convert it into an owned-and-operated station of its
Citytv
Citytv is a Canadian television network owned by the Rogers Sports & Media subsidiary of Rogers Communications. The licence of the original Citytv station, granted the callsign of CITY-TV by the CRTC on November 25, 1971 to Cable Television Ass ...
network. In the purchase application published on September 5, 2012, Rogers asked the
Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC; french: Conseil de la radiodiffusion et des télécommunications canadiennes, links=) is a public organization in Canada with mandate as a regulatory agency for broadcasti ...
(CRTC) for permission to convert CJNT from a multicultural to a full English-language station with programming and conditions of licence similar to the company's other Citytv stations. In exchange, Rogers proposed to support a new multicultural station, ICI (standing for International Channel/Canal International), whose application was made public for the first time on the same date. The CRTC heard both the application for the sale and conversion of CJNT and the application for ICI on November 7, 2012, and approved them on December 20, 2012.Broadcasting Notice of Consultation CRTC 2012-696, December 20, 2012. /ref> As promised, Rogers is supporting ICI with $1.07 million in funding as well as free access to 200 hours a year of programming from Rogers' ethnic
Omni Television
Omni Television (stylized as OMNI Television) is a Canadian television system and specialty channel owned by Rogers Sports & Media, a subsidiary of Rogers Communications. It currently consists of all six of Canada's conventional multicultural t ...
network. In addition, Channel Zero is offering the station a $1 million loan and free master control services for five years. The station turned on its transmitter for testing on August 21, 2013, and started programming on December 11, 2013, assuming CJNT's former role as Montreal's only multicultural station.
The station's call letters were to be CFHG-DT, but this was changed to CFHD-DT prior to launch.
Rogers reached an agreement to carry CFHD as part of
Omni Regional
Omni Television (stylized as OMNI Television) is a Canadian television system and specialty channel owned by Rogers Sports & Media, a subsidiary of Rogers Communications. It currently consists of all six of Canada's conventional multicultural ...
, which distributes Omni programming as a must-carry specialty channel (with carriage revenue used to help provide additional funding to Omni). In August 2017, the CRTC relieved Vidéotron from carrying CFHD on its cable systems as a terrestrial channel, as it will now carry the feed supplied by Rogers (marketed as ICI Quebec) as part of Omni Regional.
lawsuit
-
A lawsuit is a proceeding by a party or parties against another in the civil court of law. The archaic term "suit in law" is found in only a small number of laws still in effect today. The term "lawsuit" is used in reference to a civil actio ...
against Norouzi, requesting that the ICI trademark be expunged and the new station refrain from using ICI as its name. Its French arm, Radio-Canada, had registered a series of 31 trademarks surrounding the word "Ici", and announced in June 2013 that it would re-brand all of its media outlets under brands prefixed with Ici (such as "Ici Télé" for Télévision de Radio-Canada, but revised to "
Ici Radio-Canada Télé
Ici Radio-Canada Télé (formerly known as Télévision de Radio-Canada) is a Canadian French-language free-to-air television network owned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (known in French as Société Radio-Canada), the national pub ...
" after widely publicized complaints). Norouzi's trademark application for "ICI" was submitted in August 2012 and registered in September 2012, prior to the submission of the station's license application with the CRTC, while Radio-Canada's "Ici"-related trademarks were registered the following month. However, the CBC argued that his trademark was invalid because the division had used the phrase "Ici Radio-Canada" as part of its imaging since the 1930s, and that Norouzi's trademark application improperly declared that he had begun using the name in commerce, even before the station was officially unveiled or licensed.
In response, Norouzi considered the lawsuit and the CBC's ability to assert a trademark over an
adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering ...
to be "ridiculous", and stated that he intends to retain the ICI name and fight the corporation in court.
Programming
The station is structured as a producers' co-operative, where producers of local ethnic shows buy airtime on the station and sell their own advertising. TEQ was operated in a similar way. The Norouzis believed this was preferable to the commercial model employed at other ethnic stations in Canada, as the producers are closer to their communities and therefore best positioned to find advertisers. While the station's licence allows for it to air some non-ethnic programming, it airs an entirely ethnic lineup with most of it being locally produced. CFHD-DT airs programming in Italian, Greek,
Arabic
Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic languages, Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C ...
Persian
Persian may refer to:
* People and things from Iran, historically called ''Persia'' in the English language
** Persians, the majority ethnic group in Iran, not to be conflated with the Iranic peoples
** Persian language, an Iranian language of the ...
,
Romanian
Romanian may refer to:
*anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Romania
**Romanians, an ethnic group
**Romanian language, a Romance language
***Romanian dialects, variants of the Romanian language
**Romanian cuisine, traditional ...
,
Mandarin
Mandarin or The Mandarin may refer to:
Language
* Mandarin Chinese, branch of Chinese originally spoken in northern parts of the country
** Standard Chinese or Modern Standard Mandarin, the official language of China
** Taiwanese Mandarin, Stand ...
,
Cantonese
Cantonese ( zh, t=廣東話, s=广东话, first=t, cy=Gwóngdūng wá) is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou (historically known as Canton) and its surrounding are ...
Hindi
Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been de ...
French
French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to France
** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents
** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
,
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ide ...
,
Armenian
Armenian may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Armenia, a country in the South Caucasus region of Eurasia
* Armenians, the national people of Armenia, or people of Armenian descent
** Armenian Diaspora, Armenian communities across the ...
,
Polish
Polish may refer to:
* Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe
* Polish language
* Poles, people from Poland or of Polish descent
* Polish chicken
*Polish brothers (Mark Polish and Michael Polish, born 1970), American twin screenwr ...
and Creole. Programming is directed at the Armenian, Italian, Latin-American, Lebanese, Egyptian, Maghrebian, Greek, Portuguese, Chinese, Russian, Romanian, Iranian, Haitian, Jewish, German, Ukrainian, Polish, and Filipino ethnic communities in Quebec.
As of May 2014, the only programs broadcast on CFHD-DT not produced by the station or produced locally by other producers are a Portuguese soap opera, ''
Bem-Vindos a Beirais
''Bem-Vindos a Beirais'' is a Portuguese television series broadcast by RTP. It has three seasons, with a fourth scheduled to air. The first season had 100 episodes and started airing on 13 May 2013 on RTP1. The second season premiered on 4 Novem ...
''; ''South Asian Veggie Table'', the only OMNI program on CFHD's schedule; and ''Il est écrit'', the French-dubbed version of
George Vandeman
George Edward Vandeman (October 21, 1916 – November 3, 2000) was a Seventh-day Adventist evangelist who founded the ''It Is Written'' television ministry.
Biography
Vandeman was born on October 21, 1916."Vandeman, George E." in ''Historica ...
's weekly ''
It Is Written
''It Is Written'' is an internationally broadcast Seventh-day Adventist Christian television program founded in 1956 by George Vandeman. Its title comes from the Gospel of Matthew: "It is written, 'Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every ...
YouTube
YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...