The Canadian Press Cable Service (formerly CableStream) is a

text-only In computing, text-based user interfaces (TUI) (alternately terminal user interfaces, to reflect a dependence upon the properties of computer terminals and not just text), is a retronym describing a type of user interface (UI) common as an ...

headline

news News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different media: word of mouth, printing, postal systems, broadcasting, electronic communication, or through the testimony of observers and witnesses to event ...

service provided by

the Canadian Press The Canadian Press (CP; french: La Presse canadienne, ) is a Canadian national news agency headquartered in Toronto, Ontario. Established in 1917 as a vehicle for the time's Canadian newspapers to exchange news and information, The Canadian Pre ...

(CP) and distributed by

Canadian Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of ...

cable television Cable television is a system of delivering television programming to consumers via radio frequency (RF) signals transmitted through coaxial cables, or in more recent systems, light pulses through fibre-optic cables. This contrasts with bro ...

companies. The service is also commonly known as "Broadcast News", after the former CP division originally responsible for CableStream. The CP Cable Service usually appears as a dedicated cable channel, either as scrolling text or a series of text panels. However, the service does not have a uniform appearance, as its presentation varies from one cable company to the next, and it may appear with or without advertising. Typically it is accompanied with

Muzak Muzak is an American brand of background music played in retail stores and other public establishments. The name has been in use since 1934, and has been owned by a division or subsidiary of one or another company ever since. In 1981, Westingh ...

-type

background music Background music (British English: piped music) is a mode of musical performance in which the music is not intended to be a primary focus of potential listeners, but its content, character, and volume level are deliberately chosen to affect behav ...

. As alphanumeric data, the CP Cable Service has never been subject to

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 broadcast ...

(CRTC) licensing. In the early days of cable TV, many Canadian cable companies would carry the service on a "restricted" channel, i.e. a frequency on which a local TV station was broadcasting over-the-air. Since the broadcast station might interfere with whatever channel was placed at that position by the cable company, CableStream provided an easy, low-risk means of filling that position. However, with increased pressures on analog cable capacity since the late 1990s, many systems have dropped the channel or moved it to

digital cable Digital cable is the distribution of cable television using digital data and video compression. The technology was first developed by General Instrument. By 2000, most cable companies offered digital features, eventually replacing their previ ...

. In

St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador St. John's is the capital and largest city of the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador, located on the eastern tip of the Avalon Peninsula on the island of Newfoundland. The city spans and is the easternmost city in North America ...

, Cable Atlantic (and later

Rogers Cable Rogers Cable Inc. is Canada's largest cable television service provider with about 2.25 million television customers, and over 930,000 Internet subscribers, primarily in Southern & Eastern Ontario, New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador. R ...

) used CableStream until 2006 in place of blacked-out commercial breaks on the regional cable channel ASN, due to a since-removed CRTC condition of licence intended to protect local station NTV.

External links

Canadian Press Cable Service
24-hour television news channels in Canada Analog cable television networks in Canada {{Canada-tv-station-stub