In order to protect Canadian broadcasters' advertising, broadcast stations can invoke simultaneous substitution: any cable or satellite feed of an American station broadcasting the same program as a Canadian broadcast station must be blacked out and replaced by the Canadian feed. Terrestrial television broadcasts of CFL games ended in 2008, when TSN acquired exclusive TV rights to the league.Īmerican sports broadcasts are widely available in Canada, both from Canadian stations and from border blasters in the United States. From 1962 (one year after the debut of CTV) through 2007, there were two separate CFL contracts: one for CBC, and one for CTV (or a sister channel such as cable outlet TSN). Today it is consistently among the highest-rated programs in Canada.īroadcasting of the Canadian Football League has been a fixture of Canadian television since the CBC's debut in 1952. Always starting the broadcast with "Hello, Canada, and hockey fans in the United States and Newfoundland!" this phrase stuck around (albeit without the "Newfoundland" portion after the dominion confederated into Canada in 1949) all the way to CBC's first national television broadcast (the first actual broadcast was on closed-circuit in Maple Leaf Gardens in Spring 1952) of Hockey Night in Canada in October 1952. In 1933, Hewitt called a Canada-wide radio broadcast of an NHL game between the Detroit Red Wings and the Toronto Maple Leafs.
That same season, hockey broadcasting pioneer Foster Hewitt made his first broadcast. Later that month, the first full-game broadcast took place in Winnipeg. In 1923, the first radio broadcast of an ice hockey game took place on 8 February, with the broadcast of the third period of a game between Midland and North Toronto of the Ontario Hockey Association.
In 1896, a telegraph line was connected to the Victoria Rink in Montreal to update fans in Winnipeg of the Stanley Cup challenge series between Montreal and Winnipeg ice hockey teams. Broadcasting of sports started with descriptions of play sent via telegraph in the 1890s.