Almost six years after television made its official debut in Sydney and Melbourne, television came to Canberra on 2 June 1962 with the official launch of CTC7.
The channel had been five years in the making – starting in 1957 when The Canberra Times and radio station 2CA agreed to sponsor an application for a commercial television licence in the national capital.
In 1958, Canberra Television Limited was incorporated with a capital of £300,000.
The company was granted the licence for Canberra’s first, and then only, commercial television channel in November 1960. The new channel – CTC7 – was to broadcast from studios located on Black Mountain. Construction of the studio premises and transmission tower was completed in little over six months at a cost of just under £78,000. The studios were equipped with two state-of-the-art Image Orthicon cameras worth £8000 each.
Test programs were being broadcast from April 1962 with the official opening by Postmaster-General Mr C. W. Davidson on Saturday, 2 June 1962 at 7.00pm.
| CTC7: Saturday 2 June, 1962 6pm Program Preview 6.30 Documentary: Establishment Of CTC7 7pm Official Opening CTC7 7.20 Preview: Future Programs and “On Camera” Personalities 7.40 Queen’s Birthday Procession at Duntroon 8pm The BP Super Show 9pm Michael Shayne 10pm Official Opening CTC7 (Rpt) 10.20 Sunday Program Announcements, Epilogue, Close Source: The Canberra Times, 2 June 1962. |
The new channel launched with a schedule of around 30 hours of programming each week.
CTC7 has had a number of different owners over the years, including Fairfax, Kerry Stokes and Charles Curran. In 1994 it was bought by Southern Cross Broadcasting – now Southern Cross Austereo.
Just as it had a number of owners, CTC has also had many different identities on-air – including CTCTV, Super 7, Capital 7, Capital Television, Capital 10 TV Australia, Ten Capital and now Southern Cross Ten. Some of the presenters to have appeared from CTC over the years have included Karen Barlin, Frank Jones, Laurie Wilson, John Bok, Geoff Hiscock, Christine Kininmonth, Mal Grieve, Greg Robson, Sonja Allitt, Peter Chapman, Rosemary Church and Mike Larkan.
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The arrival of aggregation in March 1989 saw Capital align to the Ten Network for programming and expand its signal into the Wollongong/Illawarra and central western regions of NSW, while the Prime and WIN networks from those areas expanded into the Canberra market to represent the Seven and Nine networks.
Capital continued to produce a nightly local and national news bulletin for the Canberra market until owners Southern Cross Broadcasting axed a number of local news services across its wider network at the end of 2001. The actions of Southern Cross and rival network Prime, which had also axed a number of regional news services at around the same time, led to the then Australian Broadcasting Authority set up an investigation into the adequacy of local news coverage in regional areas. The outcome was the adoption of a points-based system which obliged regional operators to meet a required quota of local news in individual markets – although networks like Southern Cross and Prime are meeting their obligations in most markets with a scattering of two-minute local news updates throughout the day in individual markets, mostly produced from centralised facilities.
The Canberra studios of Southern Cross Ten, based in the suburb of Watson since the 1970s, now serve as the master control for much of the wider Southern Cross Austereo television network – including Southern Cross Ten in Queensland, New South Wales/ACT, Victoria and South Australia, and Southern Cross Television in Tasmania, Darwin and central Australia – and the regional co-ordination of the networks’ digital multi-channels.
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Next week, just days after the 50th anniversary of the launch of CTC7, all local analogue transmissions in Canberra and the Southern NSW market will be switched off.
Source: The Canberra Times, 2 June 1962.
Another half-century celebration for regional television this week with Launceston-based TNT9 having commenced official transmission on Saturday, 26 May 1962 for viewers across north and north-western Tasmania. It was Tasmania’s second commercial television station, two years after 
TNT9 was officially opened by Governor Lord Rowallan (pictured) on the night of Saturday, 26 May 1962, accompanied by his wife Lady Rowallan, station general manager Arthur Evans and Edmund Rouse, the managing director of W. R. Rolph and Sons.
During the 1970s local programs included the 
The 1980s were a turbulent time in Tasmanian television, with TNT9’s parent company ENT Limited (formed in the 1960s with the merger of Northern Television Limited and Examiner Newspaper Pty Ltd) successfully taking over Hobart’s TVT6. The takeover eventually led to TNT9 and TVT6 adopting a single on-air brand – TAS TV – and a uniform program schedule across the state.
Nevertheless, ENT complied with the government’s aggregation policy and sold TNT9 to Tricom Corporation for $40 million in 1988 while retaining TVT6 (TAS TV), thus forming the basis for two statewide television networks, one based in Hobart and one in Launceston. 
In April 1994 aggregation was implemented in Tasmania with Southern Cross Network (TNT) and TAS TV (TVT) now broadcasting in competition with each other across the whole of Tasmania. TAS TV (now a branch of the WIN network) had an affiliation with the Nine Network for the supply of programs, while Southern Cross formed ties with both the Seven and Ten networks for its program schedule – and since 1998 Southern Cross has dominated the ratings across the Tasmanian market.
Southern Cross Television in Tasmania has since expanded into the multi-channel environment with the network relaying the Seven Network’s digital channels 
Source: The Mercury, 26 May 1962. The Examiner, 26 May 1987. 
The Ten Network has announced plans to re-enter the late news arena with the launch of a new program to be hosted by journalist Hamish Macdonald.
Given Ten’s big-budget news expansion last year failed to pay any dividends and this year’s launch of 
Today – 1 May – sees regional broadcaster WIN launch its own digital datacast channel, following from the recent launches of 
It was at 7.00pm on Friday, 27 April 1962 that Ballarat’s first television station – BTV6 – made its first official broadcast.
BTV6’s early line-up of presenters included children’s host Max Bartlett (later to gain national fame on The Magic Circle Club), newsreader Arthur Scuffins (pictured) and presenters Eric Gracie, Val Oldfield, Brenda Reid and David Bell. Early program line-ups for the channel included Australian productions BP Pick A Box, Revue ‘62, The Johnny O’Keefe Show, The Bert Newton Show and The Best Of IMT. And with the local ABC station almost a year away, BTV6 in August commenced the direct relay of rural affairs program Country Call from ABV2 in Melbourne, keeping viewers in Ballarat and Western Victoria up to date each week on rural and agricultural matters.
As well as local news the channel maintained a steady schedule of local production over the next 30 years including children’s programs, rural affairs, daytime chat shows, sporting telecasts (including the annual Stawell Gift), religious programs, talent quests and variety programs. Apart from News, possibly the most successful local production to come from BTV6 was the variety show Six Tonight, hosted by Fred Fargher. The weekly program, often featuring local performers as well as national guest stars, ran for over a decade from 1972. The program, later re-named Thursday Night Live, gained a wider audience in the mid-1980s when it was picked up by other regional channels across Victoria – giving the show a potential audience of around one million viewers each week.
Back in the days when country TV station staffers had to be jack-of-all-trades, Gary Rice was a musician and later sales manager at the channel. He also read the local news and became general manager of the channel and later its parent company. His experience in management at BTV6 led to him taking on executive roles at the Nine, 
Expansion across the Regional Victoria market as the Nine Network affiliate saw VIC TV dominate – the first ratings survey post-aggregation saw VIC TV outrate its competitors Prime and Southern Cross Network combined.
CBN8 also produced programs like the long-running Jackpot Quiz, hosted by 
By the 1980s CBN-CWN had affiliated with another regional station, MTN9 Griffith, to form Mid State Television. Then in the late 1980s, CBN-CWN had become part of The Prime Network (now Prime7), a newly-formed network of regional stations as the industry was preparing for the new era of aggregation. Prime had aligned itself with the Seven Network for the provision of programming. In 
Over the last few years a selection of classic Crawford Productions series – including 
And another Crawfords series is also getting a new life on DVD. The Sullivans was the highly-acclaimed series depicting the life of a Melbourne family during the time of World War II. The series debuted on the Nine Network in November 1976 and was an immediate success. The Sullivan family was led by Dave (Paul Cronin, formerly from previous Crawford dramas Matlock Police and Solo One) and Grace (Lorraine Bayly) with daughter Kitty (Susan Hannaford) and sons John (Andrew McFarlane), Terry (Richard Morgan) and Tom (Steven Tandy). The Sullivans was a hit in Australia, winning a swag of awards, and sold to 20 countries. Even though World War II ended in the series in 1981 the show continued to depict life in post-War Melbourne. 
It is twenty years since the final stages of the aggregation of regional markets were launched in the eastern states – finally bringing viewers in those areas the same amount of choice of commercial television as their capital city cousins.
The change saw NBN Television (NBN3 Newcastle) align to the Nine Network for program supply, Prime (NEN9 Tamworth, ECN8 Taree) to the Seven Network, and NRTV (NRN11 Coffs Harbour, RTN8 Lismore) to the Ten Network, as they expanded their coverage into each others’ markets.
And from 1 January 1992 came the first stage in the aggregation of regional Victorian markets Ballarat, Bendigo/Central Victoria, Shepparton/Goulburn Valley, Albury/Upper Murray and Gippsland – with VIC TV (BTV6 Ballarat, 
With aggregation then completed in the major regional markets of New South Wales (including ACT), Queensland and Victoria the next step was to consider options for additional choice of commercial television in other regional markets and smaller capital cities. Aggregation was then introduced into Tasmania in April 1994, with Hobart-based TAS TV (
Saturday, 23 December, 1961 – fifty years ago today – brought an early Christmas present to residents in the Goulburn Valley and central Victorian regions with the respective areas receiving their first TV stations.
Like many commercial channels in that era, BCV presented a line-up heavy in imported – particularly American – material but the channel in its first year did pick up a number of popular Australian programs from the capital cities, including Bandstand, The Mobil-Limb Show, The Channel Nine Show, Pick-A-Box and Sunnyside Up.
Bendigo was the site of ABC’s first regional television station, ABEV1, launching in 1963 – and ABC stations were soon to spring up around Victoria in Shepparton (ABGV3), Ballarat (ABRV3), Albury (ABAV1), Gippsland (ABLV4), Mildura (ABMV4) and Swan Hill (ABSV2) with their own network of translator stations in smaller towns.
By 1973, BCV8 had partnered with GLV10 (later GLV8) to form a network presenting a common program schedule and offering national advertisers the advantage of offering a larger regional audience with a single buy of airtime. They were later joined by Mildura channel STV8.
In 1986, BCV8 won a 
With three regional television stations opening within two weeks of each other in 1961, Victoria was leading the way in the roll-out of regional television – but there was to be an raft of new stations open during 1962 in parts of New South Wales, Queensland and Tasmania and in Canberra. 
