[URBAN NOTE] "Before Toronto Had the 6ix, We Had Toronto 1"

[rfmcdonald]

Torontoist's Jesse Hawken looks at the brief history of Toronto 1, a local Toronto-centric television station that did not do well.

Today marks the debut of the Viceland channel in Toronto, a $100 million venture by Vice and Rogers to make television relevant to 18–35 year olds. The new station will occupy prime real estate on the dial as channel 15 for Rogers subscribers, but it comes with a catch: the station appears to be haunted. Most notably, 13 years ago another channel designed to appeal to the young downtown urbanite launched with much fanfare, but then disappeared two years later. Do you remember Toronto 1?

The short-lived tv channel had a vision for Toronto—a vision of condo ownership, hip and cool young people, and their fascinating water cooler conversations. But just like Poochie, when people asked if it had something to say, it suddenly said “I have to go now,” and died on the way back to its home planet.

Toronto 1 was the first general-interest non-specialty channel to hit the city’s airwaves since Citytv debuted three decades earlier. In 2002, five media groups bid for the coveted broadcast license when it was offered by the CRTC but in a surprise decision, the Commission passed on bids from CanWest and TorStar and awarded the license to the Western Canadian cable giant Craig Media. For several years Craig had borrowed heavily from Citytv’s style, running City programming on their A-Channels in Calgary and Edmonton and aping their approach to hip local news coverage. In 2001 Craig competed directly with City’s parent company CHUM by launching MTV Canada, muscling in on Much’s turf. Now here Craig was, launching a new channel in Toronto that promised “Citytv with a twist.”

Toronto 1’s advantage in securing the license was their promise to offer a Toronto channel that, unlike City and Rogers’ OMNI properties, wouldn’t be aimed at Ontario. Instead, it concentrated on local advertisers at local rates, as well as introducing a channel pitched directly at the 18-34 age group (skewing 18-49), with a modern swagger and approach befitting this diverse city.