[hugh]

Niagara News TV president Frank Thibault said the St. Catharines-based station suspended operations Monday, putting 17 people out of work.

NNTV started broadcasting in February on Cogeco digital cable channel 556, but battled technical difficulties from the get-go.

"We had a rough go in the advertising market and a bad start," Thibault said by phone Monday night from his Burlington home. "Our programming was getting better, our feedback was getting better … But it simply wasn't possible to keep going. It's better sometimes to stop, regroup and see if you can proceed."

 

[stampeder]

News does indeed happen in Niagara, but with only a digital channel on a cable system there was no hope of this venture succeeding. Given the widespread use of satellite dishes and OTA in the large rural areas of the Niagara Peninsula this was a no go.

For decades the CRTC has quashed any hints of an OTA station for Niagara, always favouring CHCH in Hamilton as the "local" station, but in my opinion a low-budget OTA station in Niagara with a good, mobile ENG fleet would attract local eyeballs and advertisers. A transmitter in Fenwick would not need to be very powerful to cover the entire peninsula well.

 

[grog]

Looks like it was poorly thought out from the start. If you're going to launch a new business, any business, you'd better be prepared to run for at least your first year with little to no income. If you only have enough cash to run for 3 or 4 months then you're taking a huge gamble. It can take longer than that just to get enough potential customers to know you even exist, never mind generating any meaningful revenue. Then of course you have a tonne of potentially unforeseen issues that can crop up when launching something as complex as a television station, so again having only 3 or 4 months leaves you virtually no room for error.

 

[mjjl]

Looking at the comments on the St. Catharines Standard article online, it appears quite a sizable number of local viewers didn't even know the channel existed.

As Stampeder said, being on a high digital channel didn't help.

 

[scrooloose]

I had forgotten it existed, and since I'm with Bell, didn't have easy access to it. Oh well. CHCH should be able to cover Niagara as well as Hamilton. They (CHCH) repeat the same stories over and over through the day anyway.

-Mike

 

[hugh]

Random thoughts:

Sounds like a "if we build it, they will come" issue with not enough funding. A station needs to market itself and if people didn't know about it then they did a lousy job selling themselves.

Also, if they had to shut down after 3 months then they were under capitalized. All TV stations lose money in the first year so you need funds to last at least 6 to 12 months.

 

[alebowgm]

While the new Sun News Network gets underway as a national conservative TV voice, it's the end of the line - at least temporarily - for an attempt at a local cable news operation in the Niagara region. St. Catharines-based Niagara News TV (NNTV) suspended its broadcasts last Monday after less than three months on Cogeco digital cable. President Frank Thibault tells the St. Catharines Standard he still hopes to relaunch the station this fall (its cable channel remains active with weather and a news crawl), and he regrets having to let the channel's 17 staffers go.

http://fybush.com/nerw.html#can