The world's first all-electric radio station started here
Toronto Broadcasting History
Toronto's broadcasting industry produced a genuine world-first in 1927, reinvented local television in 1972, and gave Canada its own answer to MTV in 1984 — a throughline most people don't realize connects three completely different eras.
.jpg)
Advertisement
Our media and entertainment guide covers Toronto's film and music industries. This is the broadcasting side specifically — radio and television — where the city produced a genuine engineering first and, decades later, reinvented what local TV could look like.
CFRB (1927): a world first
CFRB went on air on February 19, 1927, launched by Edward "Ted" Rogers Sr. — founder of what became Rogers Communications — using a transmitter of his own design that made CFRB the world's first all-electric radio station, eliminating the noisy batteries every other station still relied on. It later moved to the 1010 AM frequency it still broadcasts on today.
Citytv (1972): reinventing local television
Moses Znaimer and a group of partners launched Citytv on September 28, 1972, as Canada's first commercial UHF television station — deliberately scrappy, low-budget and street-level in a way conventional broadcasters weren't, with reporters using handheld cameras well before that was standard practice anywhere in North American local news.
MuchMusic (1984): Canada's own MTV
Building directly on Citytv's infrastructure and philosophy, Znaimer and producer John Martin launched MuchMusic on August 31, 1984 — a 24-hour music video channel that became a genuine cultural institution for a generation of Canadian viewers, and a launching pad for Canadian musicians the way MTV was in the U.S.
CBC in Toronto
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada's public broadcaster, was founded nationally in 1936 and has run major English-language television and radio operations from Toronto for decades, based since 1992 at the Canadian Broadcasting Centre on Front Street — a short walk from Union Station.
Advertisement