About NAC TV

NAC TV

Overview

NAC TV — Neepawa Access Community Television — is a community television station serving Neepawa, Manitoba, and one of a small and shrinking number of independently licensed, over-the-air community TV stations left in Canada. The station is owned by Neepawa Access Community Television (NACTV) Inc., a community-owned, not-for-profit organization run by a volunteer board with a small staff and a large corps of volunteers. It broadcasts over the air on UHF channel 30 at low power (100 watts), is carried locally by Westman Communications on channel 117, and — unusually for a station from a town of a few thousand people — is distributed across Manitoba on MTS channels 30 and 1030 and across Canada on Bell Satellite TV channel 592. Its over-the-air call sign, assigned sequentially by the CRTC, is CH5248.

Because it holds its own broadcasting licence rather than existing as a cable company's community channel, NAC TV has long punched above its weight. When the CRTC considered the station's affairs in 2012, NAC TV pointed out that it was the only over-the-air television station in rural Manitoba; with the closure of other rural transmitters and stations, its cameras have often been the only local television presence across a wide stretch of the province's southwest.

History

Local accounts trace the station's beginnings to 1977, when a founding meeting was held in the living room of Ivan Traill, who would serve NACTV for decades as its board chair, chief executive and general manager. Reference listings date the start of its cable service to 1978 and its over-the-air broadcasts to 1983, making it a product of the first generation of Canadian community access television, when cable systems were required to give local residents a channel of their own. The CRTC renewed the station's licence in 2005 for a term running to 2012.

In October 2012 the station's reach changed dramatically when it joined the MTS television lineup in Manitoba, and it was added to Bell Satellite TV's channel 592 later the same year, taking the Neepawa signal to viewers nationwide. The expansion came with new pressures. In Broadcasting Decision CRTC 2012-661, the Commission denied NAC TV's bid for support from a local programming fund, a case in which the station described how national advertising buying had cost it major local advertisers and how satellite television's spread had eroded its budget, while opponents warned that a precedent would draw in dozens of community licensees. The decision recorded that there were then only nine over-the-air community television licence holders in the country.

By 2016, longtime leader Ivan Traill counted just seven community access stations remaining in Canada, with Neepawa's the smallest community of them. At the station's annual general meeting on November 1, 2016, Traill stepped down and the board announced a three-year management agreement with the Neepawa Banner, the local newspaper, to handle day-to-day business operations — an arrangement both sides stressed did not transfer ownership, with NACTV remaining a non-profit under its volunteer board. "Just keep the damn thing alive," Traill told the meeting, as local reporting recorded it; "we need to keep a station where people have access to the airwaves." Subsequent local reporting described the station working down a modest accumulated debt of roughly $11,000 and surveying viewers, who ranked its news programming — council coverage, The Mayor's Hotline and NACTV Reads the News — as their favourites. In 2022 the station moved from a 10 a.m.-to-10 p.m. scheduled day to 24-hour scheduled programming, with programs repeated overnight. At its October 24, 2024 annual general meeting, held at Kinsmen Kourts 2, the board, staff and volunteers discussed a year of financial difficulty but also new opportunities, and put out an urgent call for more volunteers.

Programming and Content

NAC TV's schedule is built from the civic and social life of Neepawa and the surrounding region. It airs town council meetings, live bingo, local news and public affairs, hockey and other local sports, and ethnic, religious, children's and special-interest programs, much of it filmed and produced by community volunteers. Reference listings credit the station with about 55 hours per week of local programming. Its public-affairs output includes Neepawa Council Debrief, a wrap-up of council business, and interview and magazine programs produced through the federal Local Journalism Initiative (LJI), which funds a reporter position at the station.

Recent LJI-supported stories posted to the national Community Media Portal through 2025 show the station's range: coverage of Neepawa's Filipino Heritage Day celebrations in June and July 2025 and the community's growing Filipino population, a program on men's mental health and the newcomer experience, residents of nearby Carberry opposing a proposed intersection redesign, a proposal for a new long-term recreation facility, the launch of the Kiwanis Club of Neepawa, consumer housing education workshops, and plans for the town's first Multicultural Day celebration. The station's year-in-review for 2024, written by its LJI reporter Rrain Prior, ranged from a controlled burn at Riverbend Park to the town's first Pride celebration — a record of a community station documenting a changing prairie town. Live events such as the Rotary TV Auction have been fixtures of its fundraising and its schedule for decades.

Audience and Reach

NAC TV's home market is Neepawa, a town in Manitoba's Westman region, and its over-the-air signal and Westman Communications carriage serve the surrounding area. Its satellite and provincial carriage, however, give it a footprint far beyond its size: the station is available throughout Manitoba on MTS and across Canada on Bell Satellite TV, and it streams online. Traill remarked in 2016 that since the station joined the Bell and MTS feeds, viewers from Vancouver Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, Northern Ontario and across Manitoba had written in about its programs — anecdotal evidence, as he acknowledged, but an indication that the little Neepawa channel had acquired a national curiosity audience alongside its local one. The station does not publish ratings, and no audience figures are claimed for it beyond its documented carriage.

Digital Presence

NAC TV streams its programming online at nactv.tv and distributes its local journalism through the Community Media Portal, the national platform for community media, where its Neepawa page carries new stories and programs on a continuing basis, including through 2025. The portal describes the station as broadcasting 24 hours a day. As of October 2026, the station's long-standing nactv.ca web address displayed generic website-template placeholder text rather than station information — a discrepancy worth confirming before publication — while its programming and community presence continued through the streaming site and the portal.

Ownership and Organisation

The station is owned by Neepawa Access Community Television (NACTV) Inc., a not-for-profit corporation owned by the community and governed by a volunteer board of directors elected at annual general meetings. According to the Community Media Portal, the station operates with four full-time staff members alongside its volunteers, and its content is primarily filmed and produced by local volunteers. Since 2016 its business operations have been supported under a management agreement with the Neepawa Banner newspaper, which does not own the station. Funding is a perennial challenge assembled from advertising, donations and fundraising, CBRA royalties and project support such as the Local Journalism Initiative, which the station has credited as crucial to keeping local reporting alive. Reporting on the October 2024 AGM by the Community Media Portal shows a board and staff openly wrestling with finances while planning for sustainability — the typical economics of Canada's smallest television stations.

Contact and Availability

NAC TV broadcasts from Neepawa, Manitoba, over the air on UHF channel 30, on Westman Communications channel 117 in the local area, on MTS channels 30 and 1030 across Manitoba and on Bell Satellite TV channel 592 nationally. Its programming streams at nactv.tv, and its local journalism can be viewed through the Community Media Portal's Neepawa page. Community members interested in volunteering or proposing programming deal directly with the station's board and staff in Neepawa.