About Rogers TV Nanaimo

Rogers TV Nanaimo

Overview

Rogers TV Nanaimo is the community television channel serving Nanaimo, British Columbia, on Rogers' cable network, where the City of Nanaimo directs residents to find it on channel 4 or 105. It is the Nanaimo station of Rogers TV, Rogers Communications' group of English-language community channels. The station is a genuinely distinct local outlet: within Shaw Cable's old Vancouver Island structure, Nanaimo had its own community channel feed rather than simply receiving Victoria's, and that separateness continues under Rogers. The channel's name, however, is recent. For decades the service was Shaw Cable's Shaw TV Nanaimo, and from late 2018 it was Shaw Spotlight; it became Rogers TV only after Rogers acquired Shaw in April 2023 and merged the surviving Shaw Spotlight channels into Rogers TV in late 2023. Its schedule combines locally produced civic and community programming with shows drawn from a pool of Vancouver Island community production, and its most visible current role is civic: Nanaimo city council meetings, the city's annual budget eTown Hall and civic ceremonies are televised on the channel.

History

Nanaimo's cable undertaking was a Shaw system — CRTC records from the mid-2000s list Shaw Cablesystems as the licensee serving Nanaimo — and its community channel developed as Shaw TV Nanaimo. Island community television had a distinctive structure: the South Vancouver Island service was based on channel 4, and Nanaimo had a separate channel of its own on the same channel 4 position, its schedule filled partly with Nanaimo-area production and partly with programming produced elsewhere on Vancouver Island — in Port Alberni, the Comox Valley, the Cowichan Valley, Campbell River, Powell River and Victoria, whose community producers all made shows that circulated within the island system. Local sports crews were part of that production culture: Nanaimo minor hockey, including Silvertips midget hockey, was covered under the Shaw TV Nanaimo banner. The channel thus sat between a purely local station and a regional network — a Nanaimo feed with island-wide content sharing.

Nanaimo was untouched by Shaw's 2017 closures, which shut the community channels in Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton after a CRTC policy change for metropolitan markets; the Nanaimo station carried on and rebranded with the rest of the western network to Shaw Spotlight in late 2018, appearing in Shaw Spotlight's community list for the whole of that service's life. On 3 April 2023 Rogers Communications completed its acquisition of Shaw, and in late 2023 Shaw Spotlight was wound up and its channels rebranded to and merged with Rogers TV. Nanaimo's channel took the Rogers TV name, kept its channel positions — 4 on the legacy lineup and 105 on the newer platform, as the city's own notices put it — and gained its own station page on the Rogers TV website.

Programming and Content

Civic coverage is the channel's signature. The City of Nanaimo televises its council business on the service: the city's published guidance tells residents they can watch council meetings on Rogers tv Nanaimo channel 4 or 105 as well as on the city website. The centrepiece is the eTown Hall, Nanaimo's interactive budget meeting, a format the city launched in March 2013 — an early edition won a Bronze award for Innovation Management from the Institute of Public Administration of Canada — in which residents question council on the coming budget in person, by phone and online. Sixteen eTown Halls had been held by late 2025, and the editions tied to the city's recent budget cycles were carried on the channel: the December 2024 eTown Hall for the 2025 budget and the December 1, 2025 eTown Hall for the 2026–2030 financial plan were both promoted by the city as watchable live on Rogers tv channel 4 or 105. The city likewise directed residents to Rogers tv to watch Nanaimo's 2025 Remembrance Day ceremony from the Dallas Square Cenotaph live from home.

Around that civic core, the schedule follows the community channel pattern documented for the island: locally made shows from Nanaimo producers and organizations, community access programming assessed by station staff for production capability and community involvement, and programs shared among Vancouver Island's community production centres, so that a show made in Campbell River or Port Alberni can appear on the Nanaimo feed and Nanaimo productions can travel the other way. Local sport, which in the Shaw years included minor hockey telecasts, remains part of the access tradition rather than a network property: the leagues and tournaments seen on the channel today are there because local crews produce them.

Audience and Reach

The channel is available only to subscribers of Rogers' cable service in Nanaimo, on channels 4 and 105 as the city's notices list them; community channels are not distributed by competing providers or satellite services. Its home audience is therefore the cable households of Nanaimo and its surrounding area on central Vancouver Island, with a secondary reach across the island through the long-standing practice of sharing community productions among the island's cable communities. No ratings or subscriber figures for the Nanaimo channel itself are published, and none are claimed here. Its civic programming gives it a particular kind of reach regardless: when the city itself tells residents that council meetings, the budget eTown Hall and the Remembrance Day ceremony can be watched on Rogers tv, the channel functions as part of Nanaimo's civic infrastructure.

Digital Presence

The channel's digital home is its station page on the Rogers TV website, rogerstv.com/nanaimo, which carries its shows, schedules and local event listings alongside the rest of the Rogers TV network, and Rogers TV programming is also available through Rogers On Demand. The city complements the television window with its own streams — council meetings and the eTown Hall are also webcast through nanaimo.ca — so Nanaimo's civic programming reaches residents on both platforms. Community producers who make shows with the station commonly maintain their own video and social channels as well, following the pattern across the Rogers TV group of pairing the cable broadcast with online publication.

Ownership and Organisation

Rogers TV Nanaimo is owned and operated by Rogers Communications, which acquired the channel with Shaw's cable and community television operations in April 2023. Production sits within Rogers' community television organization: a small staff works with trained volunteers and independent community producers, and the station draws on the Vancouver Island production pool that predates the Rogers era. The service is funded through the community-channel contributions attached to Rogers' cable distribution licences. Shaw Spotlight's compliance with community television policy was examined in the CRTC's approval of the Rogers–Shaw transaction (Broadcasting Decision CRTC 2022-76), where Rogers committed to bring the former Shaw service into full compliance and keep it there, including mentorship initiatives for Indigenous content creators across the community channel footprint — commitments Rogers' corporate reporting has since described as extending into its western markets, Vancouver Island among them.

Contact and Availability

Nanaimo viewers can find the channel on Rogers cable channels 4 and 105, the positions given in the City of Nanaimo's own viewing guidance, and its shows, schedules and community event listings are posted on its station page at rogerstv.com/nanaimo, through which residents and organizations can also pursue community access productions. The channel is not available through other television service providers. Council meetings and the eTown Hall can additionally be streamed on the City of Nanaimo's website for viewers without cable.