About TV Rogers Ottawa

TV Rogers Ottawa

Overview

TV Rogers Ottawa is the French-language community cable channel serving Ottawa, Ontario, carried on channel 23 for subscribers of Rogers Cable in the national capital. It is the French-language counterpart of Rogers TV Ottawa, the English-language community channel on channel 22 in the same city: the two channels are sister services of Rogers Communications, one serving Ottawa's anglophone audience and the other its francophone community, in a city where French-language civic and cultural life is a defining feature. TV Rogers Ottawa is itself part of a wider service. TV Rogers is the French-language sister network of Rogers TV, a small network of five community stations: four in New Brunswick — Bathurst on channel 9, the Acadian Peninsula and Edmundston on channel 10, and Moncton on channel 9 — and one in Ontario, Ottawa on channel 23, which makes the Ottawa station the service's only Ontario outlet and its link to the largest francophone community outside Quebec's major centres. Like its English-language sibling, the channel exists to reflect its local community: its programming mixes access programs produced by members of the public with programs produced by Rogers staff, in French, for the Ottawa region. It is available only within the Rogers cable system in Ottawa and is not carried by other television providers.

History

TV Rogers is the French-language arm of Rogers' community channel operation, and reference sources date the service's launch to 1968, the era when Canadian cable companies first began originating local community programming; it was formerly known as Télévision Rogers. For most of its history it operated in the shadow of the larger English-language service, under the shared Rogers Television name, until April 2008, when Rogers rebranded its community channels: the English-language stations became Rogers TV, and the French-language stations were given the distinct TV Rogers name, with a shared logo family, revamped websites and on-air graphics across the network. A further relaunch of the community channel presentation followed on 1 September 2016. The service's geography reflects where Rogers operates cable systems with significant francophone populations: the four New Brunswick stations serve the province's Acadian communities, while Ottawa — where the channel serves the capital's French-speaking residents and the wider bilingual region across the river from Gatineau — carries the service into Ontario. The network survived the significant retrenchment of Rogers' community television operation in 2017, when Rogers TV stations in the Greater Toronto Area closed after CRTC rule changes allowed community-channel funding in metropolitan markets to be redirected to local news; TV Rogers' stations, serving smaller and minority-language markets, were not part of those closures, and the Ottawa French channel continues to operate.

Programming and Content

Programming on TV Rogers channels is a mix of access programming produced by the general public and licensee programming originating from Rogers staff. Across the service, that mix covers political programming, sports coverage, live bingo shows, entertainment series, election coverage, telethons, municipal council coverage, documentaries and specials — the established community-channel repertoire, produced in French for local audiences. As across the Rogers community channel network, new programs come forward through an annual process: the service receives applications from the community for new shows, which individual station managers and producers review, weighing production capabilities, likelihood of sponsorship, willingness of community involvement and the uniqueness of the programming, and the majority of programs are produced in the station's own region in accordance with the community channel model. The service has also carried children's animation in French within its schedules at times. Ottawa viewers have seen that model at work in current programming. In May 2025, the French-language edition of Time Travelling with the Historical Society of Ottawa began airing on the Ottawa channel 23 — the French counterpart of the English series broadcast on Rogers TV channel 22 — with episodes including Dominique Lajoie's "Château Laurier: Si les murs pouvaient parler" on 14 May 2025 and Rick Henderson's "Philemon Wright et son village" the following week, giving Ottawa's francophone audience its own version of the local-history series recorded at Beechwood Cemetery. The French edition was given a full repeat pattern across the week on channel 23 — an original Wednesday 9:00 p.m. timeslot with further airings Thursday at 12:30 p.m. and 8:30 p.m., Friday at 4:00 p.m. and Monday at 11:00 a.m. — and French-language episodes of the series had already appeared on channel 23 alongside the first season's run in spring 2025. Local sport in French is part of the service as well: when Rogers TV Ottawa partnered with the Ottawa Titans of the Frontier League in the summer of 2025, selected Titans games received French telecasts with Mikael Lafleur providing French play-by-play, carried on the TV Rogers side of the Ottawa service. Election and civic coverage in French, community events programming and access shows produced by francophone community groups complete the channel's local offer.

Audience and Reach

TV Rogers Ottawa is available to Rogers Cable subscribers in Ottawa on channel 23; it is not available over the air or on competing providers. Its audience is the capital's francophone community — residents of Ottawa and the surrounding area who live, work and follow civic life in French — together with bilingual viewers who use both of the city's Rogers community channels. No ratings are published for TV Rogers or for individual community channels, and Rogers does not release channel-level audience figures; the wider Rogers TV service, English and French together, reports serving more than 2.3 million cable subscribers across its regions, a network-level figure rather than a measurement of the Ottawa French channel's audience. Within its small network, Ottawa is one of five TV Rogers stations, and the only one in Ontario; the other four serve New Brunswick's Acadian communities in Bathurst, the Acadian Peninsula, Edmundston and Moncton.

Digital Presence

The channel's online home is the Ottawa section of tvrogers.com, the French-language service's website. The Ottawa page — published under the heading "Émissions – tv Rogers Ottawa (Français)" — presents the channel's shows, its current on-air programming and schedule information, and invites local groups to publicise community events through the channel's events pages. Content from the channel also circulates beyond the site: episodes of the Historical Society of Ottawa's Time Travelling series, for example, were slated for the TV Rogers YouTube channel after their broadcast windows, and the society publishes the French series' schedules on its own site, extending the Ottawa channel's French-language local programming to online viewers.

Ownership and Organisation

TV Rogers Ottawa is owned and operated by Rogers Communications through Rogers Cable, as part of the TV Rogers service, the French-language sister of Rogers TV. The channel is administered within the same community-channel organisation that runs Rogers TV Ottawa: programming is produced by Rogers staff working with volunteers, community associations and local partners, under common branding and presentation standards across the Rogers community channel network. Its position as the only Ontario station in a five-station French-language network gives it a particular role in the company's structure: it is the French-language community service for Rogers' Ottawa cable system, complementing the English-language channel 22 rather than competing with it, and sharing production partnerships — such as the Ottawa Titans broadcasts and the Historical Society of Ottawa series, each produced in English and French versions — across the two channels.

Contact and Availability

TV Rogers Ottawa is available to Rogers Cable subscribers in Ottawa on channel 23. Program schedules, show information and community event listings are published in French through the Ottawa section of tvrogers.com. The channel does not publish a general public business email address, and none is listed in this profile.