CFJC

CFJC-TV

CFJC-TV is a television station in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada, that is owned by the Jim Pattison Broadcast Group. It broadcasts its analogue signal on VHF channel 4, and is carried on channel 7 on area cable systems. CFJC is also rebroadcast on channel 309 with Star Choice and 259 with Bell TV.

Since 2006, the station has been operated as an affiliate of Canwest's secondary E! system (originally known as CH), although it had been carrying much of that system's programming during its final years as a CBC affiliate.

History

CFJC began operations on April 8, 1957 as a CBC affiliate, under the call sign CFCR-TV; the station was recalled with its current name (similar to Kamloops radio station CFJC, its owner at the time) on September 1, 1971. Both stations were bought by the Jim Pattison Group in 1987.

By the 1990s, CFJC had delegated its national advertising sales to Western International Communications, owner of fellow CBC affiliate CHBC Kelowna. WIC began selling the two stations' advertising as a single unit under the name "BCI TV". Ever since, both stations have carried virtually identical programming schedules apart from local news, with the majority of non-CBC programming coming from Global and, to a lesser extent, WIC itself (Global was not available as a stand-alone channel in the B.C. interior until 2001). Canwest acquired CHBC in 2000 and assumed the same role in selling advertising and providing programming, primarily from its CH service. During the 1990s and early 2000s, the station branded itself as "CFJC TV7", in reference to its cable channel in the Kamloops area.

On November 1, 2005, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) announced it had received an application from Pattison to disaffiliate CFJC from CBC. According to documents filed with the commission, the continuation of CFJC's joint sales agreement with Kelowna station CHBC — which had previously received clearance to disaffiliate and become a CH station under Canwest — was contingent on CFJC's concurrent disaffiliation.

The CRTC gave its approval on February 1, and CFJC disaffiliated from CBC on February 27. While CFJC initially called itself "The All-New Independent TV7" following disaffiliation, Canwest continued to supply the bulk of the station's programming, and CFJC became, in effect, the first CH affiliate not owned by Canwest.

In September 2007, CH was rebranded as "E!", complete with several E!-branded programs, making it difficult for CFJC to continue to call itself "independent". By October, the station had embraced the new E! identity in non-local programming, and re-branded its newscasts from "CFJC TV7 News" to simply "CFJC News", in line with the Canwest-owned E! stations elsewhere in the country.

The 2006 affiliation switch had left the CBC solely dependent on cable and satellite carriage of its Vancouver station CBUT in the market, with no new terrestrial transmitters installed in the Kamloops area for the foreseeable future. The CBC indicated it had not budgeted for this scenario and therefore could not afford to replace the transmitters, as it has done in most cases in the past when private affiliates left the network. Most other stations from which the transmitters have been replaced became O&O stations, while CFJC remained independently owned.

It was announced that the transmitters of Jim Pattison's CBC affiliates, future E! affiliates CKPG-TV Prince George and CHAT-TV Medicine Hat will not be replaced by the CBC, and no transmitters are scheduled to be installed for the future in these areas. All three areas are to be served by Jim Pattison Group and one other television network. However, despite the light Francophone population in the absence of an Anglophone network, Radio-Canada stations CBUFT Vancouver will still be available over-the-air in Kamloops and Prince George, and CBXFT Edmonton will still be available in Medicine Hat.

Transmitters

CFJC-TV has a rather extensive network of rebroadcast transmitters to serve outlying communities because of the mountainous areas.

Station	City of licence	Channel	ERP	HAAT	Transmitter Coordinates
CFJC-TV-3	Merritt	8 (VHF)	0.009 kW	NA
CFJC-TV-4	Clinton	9 (VHF)	0.204 kW	617 m
CFJC-TV-5	Williams Lake	8 (VHF)	0.009 kW	NA
CFJC-TV-6	100 Mile House	5 (VHF)	0.98 kW	570.3 m
CFJC-TV-8	Chase	11 (VHF)	0.005 kW	NA
CFJC-TV-11	Quesnel	7 (VHF)	0.009 kW	NA
CFJC-TV-12	Nicola	10 (VHF)	0.009 kW	NA
CFJC-TV-19	Pritchard	2 (VHF)	0.01 kW	NA