City TV (Lenapore)

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City TV was the name given to three television channels owned by Lenaporean media conglomerate Mediacorp. The channels stemmed from individual Sportscity channels that eventually became separate City TV-branded channels (not to be confused with the Keithlandian channel of the same name).

History[edit | edit source]

The Television Corporation of Lenapore applied for two licenses: one in Cantonments and one in Hamanashi, in September 1998. In January 1999, a third license for Lenapore City was added. The LBA (now MRA) approved the licenses in April. TCL was initially going to make the channels individual local channels under an unknown name (the press suggested "Local TV" as a hypothesis) and they would broadcast from the Mediacorp facilities (Mediacorp had replaced LIM in June 1999) in the aforementioned cities. Later on in the year, the plans were revised and the local network became Sportscity, the first FTA sports channel in the ASESON region. Under the revised plan, as Mediacorp's answer to the growth of the Local Media Network, the channels outside of Lenapore City would broadcast two hours of programming made locally from 4pm to 6pm (Cantonments produced in English and Mandarin and Hamanashi in Japanese) and then they would connect to the Lenapore City feed for the day's schedule until around midnight or later when the channel closed down. The Lenapore City feed of Sportscity was made available to the entire country on LCV's cable and satellite networks, except for Hamanashi and Cantonments.

The channel launched on January 30, 2000 (the same day DTT launched and Lenapore Television Twelve was restructured) on both analog and digital terrestrial networks in Lenapore City (the rest still had analog). The daily schedule for all feeds opened at 6pm on weekdays and in the afternoons on weekends. There was to be no local programming on weekends, and said programming on weekdays was often unrelated to the basic theme of the channel: sports. These included local newscasts shown at 5:30pm on the two "local feeds" and had to end forcibly at 5:55pm in order to accomodate the daily opening of Sportscity. The primetime format of Sportscity was based on its competitors, all on cable: ESPN, STAR Sports and LCV's Football Channel. It also broadcast the entirety of the 2000 Summer Olympics in Southgate, selected matches of Eurecti 2000, NBA, WWF (now WWE), PGA, and other sports. The format didn't work and in 2001 it was already presenting heavy losses.

On May 20, 2001, the network was renamed City TV. Cantonments fell to the scheduling format adopted by the Lenapore City feed and both channels had to broadcast programming in Mandarin in the afternoon. Sports programming made a slow move to Mediacorp's general interest channels, particularly Channel 5. To fill in the gaps, the primetime programming was now consisting mainly of entertainment in English, including holdovers that were to be seen on TV Mobile, Mediacorp's bus, train and subway network in the same cities where City TV operated. In Hamanashi, the Mandarin programming was replaced by an extended block of Japanese-language programming, and was now branded as Mediacorp Hamanashi (TV Hamanashi was already taken by an LMN channel that is still around today).

Mediacorp decided to shut down City TV in Lenapore City on January 11, 2002 due to a series of constraints mainly linked to the Sondrian crisis of the time. The Cantonments and Hamanashi channels survived for longer. Their broadcast hours had to be readjusted to accomodate the lack of City TV in the evenings - both channels now ran from 6pm to midnight. The main evening news was at 7pm. In June of the same year, both channels agreed to repeat matches of the World Cup in Daehan and Orience, also broadcast on Mediacorp's three main channels: Channel 5, Channel 8 and Sakura. Despite the experiment, the Cantonments channel was living on losses and decided to cancel its local programming minus the news and reduce the programming to four hours until 10pm. The channel eventually shut down on January 11, 2003, exactly one year on from City TV's shutdown. The Hamanashi channel prospered but by early 2003 was failing and had realized that the channel was not of any use. It shut down on March 31 the same year.

Currently all frequencies formerly occupied by City TV are now occupied by LPBS Parliament, who bought the frequencies from Mediacorp in 2003.