About Canal 7 Rawson

Canal 7 Rawson

Canal 7 Rawson is the public television channel of the province of Chubut, Argentina. It broadcasts from Rawson, the provincial capital, on channel 7 under the call sign LU 90 TV, and is owned by the provincial state — its producing entity is the Subsecretaría de Medios y Comunicación Pública of the Government of Chubut. Academic studies of Argentine provincial state television record that Canal 7 Rawson began its transmissions on 15 September 1975, and the channel's own workforce and the television workers' union SATSAID marked its thirty-eighth anniversary in 2013, counting from 1975. From Rawson, its signal is carried across the vast territory of Chubut through a network of repeaters.

Canal 7 is the television arm of Chubut's provincial public media. For much of its history it retransmitted the programming of Canal 13 of Buenos Aires; from 2009 it was incorporated into the national public system, taking the programming of TV Pública, Encuentro and Pakapaka alongside its own local production. In a province where distances are large and many communities are small and remote, the channel's stated mission has been one of public service: to take free television to places where commercial broadcasting does not reach.

Overview

Canal 7 Rawson is a public, generalist channel. Its schedule combines local production made in Rawson — news, magazines and general-interest programmes — with retransmissions of the national public signals TV Pública, Encuentro and Pakapaka, which supply educational, children's and cultural content. The station broadcasts in Spanish, and its distribution has historically rested on an analogue repeater network spread across Chubut, later complemented by the national digital terrestrial platform and satellite distribution through ARSAT.

The channel has been known on air by a succession of slogans that express its provincial identity, among them "Televisión del Chubut", "Chubut Te Ve Como Sos", "Entre Todos", "Como Sos" and "Siempre Televisión". Its headquarters are in Rawson, the small provincial capital on the Atlantic coast near the mouth of the Chubut River.

History

Provincial television in Chubut was a creation of the provincial state. A provincial law of January 1977 — Law 1417, published in the official bulletin of Rawson on 11 January of that year — already regulated the operation of "LU 90 TV Canal 7 de Rawson", empowering the Subsecretary of Information and Tourism to contract artistic services, recordings, film material and technical services for the station, which shows that the channel was in operation in the mid-1970s. Academic research on the television of the Argentine provincial states dates the start of its transmissions precisely to 15 September 1975.

In its first decades Canal 7 functioned largely as a repeater of Buenos Aires television: its programming retransmitted the set of contents of Canal 13 of the City of Buenos Aires. That model, common to the provincial state channels created in the 1970s, gave Chubut viewers access to national programming while the station developed a limited amount of its own production, above all news and local magazines. The workers of the channel have recalled good and bad times across its four decades, emphasising the role of the staff in keeping the station on air: in the words expressed by the national deputy Mónica Contrera, herself a former Canal 7 worker and SATSAID leader, on the channel's thirty-eighth anniversary in 2013, it was always the workers who "put the channel on their shoulders", defending jobs and the mission of public media, and who in the two years before that anniversary had led a new beginning for the provincial public television, opening it to modernity, incorporating content and winning recognition.

Integration into the public system

A turning point came in 2009, when Canal 7 was incorporated into the federal public media system. From that year the station added to its schedule the programming of the national public signals — TV Pública, Encuentro and Pakapaka — in addition to programmes of local production, replacing the previous dependence on the commercial Canal 13 feed. The change aligned Rawson with the other Argentine provincial public channels, which during the same period integrated the content system organised by the national government under the Audiovisual Communication Services Law.

From 2012 the provincial government undertook a transformation of the channel linked to the arrival of digital terrestrial television. The director of the station explained in 2015 that the channel reached the province through 63 analogue repeaters distributed across the whole provincial territory, providing open, free and inclusive coverage, and that with entry into the satellite system and the digital terrestrial platform, the most populated city of the province, Comodoro Rivadavia, would for the first time receive public television through the TDA platform. Agreements signed with Canal Encuentro, TV Pública, Pakapaka and DeporTV supplied a varied public schedule, and the channel announced that from January of the following year it would enter the regional and national digital terrestrial grid, with a bet on local content production. The channel's management framed the policy in terms of rights: public television reaches the places nobody else is interested in reaching because it is not profitable, and its work is a service.

Ownership and public role

Canal 7 Rawson belongs to the provincial state of Chubut and is produced by the Subsecretaría de Medios y Comunicación Pública of the provincial government. It is the television component of the public media of a province whose capital, Rawson, is a small administrative city, while the largest population centres — Comodoro Rivadavia, Trelew, Puerto Madryn and Esquel — lie at great distances from the capital. That geography defines the channel's public role: provincial integration through information, culture and entertainment, and the guarantee of a free television signal in localities where the commercial market does not sustain one.

The limits of that mission have also been visible in practice: local reporting has documented communities such as Las Plumas, in the Chubut steppe, spending around two years without the Canal 7 signal when repeater service failed — a reminder that the channel's value to remote viewers depends on the maintenance of an extensive and dispersed transmission network.

Programming

The programming of Canal 7 Rawson is characterised by a combination of local content and retransmissions of the public channels. Its local production includes Informativo 7, its news service; Media Mañana, a morning programme; and Platos al Aire, a general-interest and entertainment format, among other local magazines. To this are added the productions of Encuentro and Pakapaka, which enrich the educational and cultural offer, and content from TV Pública and DeporTV. The diversity of the grid seeks to serve a varied audience, from children to adults, mixing provincial information with national public content.

Local reporting on the channel has noted that the quality of its programming has received national recognition, with prizes and praise highlighting its commitment to the relevance of its contribution to the country's media landscape — an unusual distinction for a small provincial station, and one its workforce has cited as evidence of what a public channel staffed by its own workers can achieve.

News operation

News is the backbone of the channel's own production. Informativo 7 provides the provincial news service from Rawson, covering the government and legislature seated in the capital, the life of the towns of the lower Chubut valley, and, through the repeater network and exchanges with the rest of the provincial media system, the whole of Chubut. Morning production such as Media Mañana complements the news service with service information and general interest for the province's early audience. As the channel of the provincial state, its news operation also carries the official and institutional information of Chubut, alongside its reporting of community life across the province's regions — the valley, the coast, the Andes foothills and the central steppe.

Distribution and reach

Canal 7 is the head station of a repeater network that its management numbered at 63 analogue repeaters distributed throughout the provincial territory, giving open, free coverage across Chubut. Rawson itself is listed among Argentine cities as the headquarters of Canal 7, property of the provincial state with repeaters in the whole province. The incorporation of the channel into the digital terrestrial platform and its distribution involving ARSAT extended its reach, in particular bringing the provincial public signal to Comodoro Rivadavia, the province's largest city, which had historically been served instead by its own private channel, Canal 9. Reception difficulties in isolated localities, such as the prolonged loss of signal reported at Las Plumas, show the practical challenges of maintaining that coverage.

Digital transition

The channel's passage to digital television was organised around the national Televisión Digital Abierta platform. Provincial management presented the process, begun in 2012, as a complex transformation facilitated by the structural tool of the TDA, involving satellite entry, new content agreements with the national public signals and the incorporation of the channel into the digital grid at regional and national level. The successive changes of the channel's image and slogans across the 2000s and 2010s — from "Chubut Te Ve Como Sos" to "Entre Todos", "Televisión del Chubut" and "Siempre Televisión" — accompanied that modernisation of the provincial public screen.

Audience and significance

Canal 7 Rawson is a foundational institution of Chubut's public life. Created by the provincial state in 1975, it brought television from the capital to one of Argentina's largest and most thinly populated provinces, and for fifty years it has been the common screen of communities separated by hundreds of kilometres of steppe. Its evolution — from repeater of a Buenos Aires commercial network to member of the national public content system, and from an analogue repeater chain to digital and satellite distribution — reflects the trajectory of Argentine provincial public television as a whole. For viewers in the small towns of the interior, where it may be the only free signal reliably available, Canal 7 is not simply a channel but a public service, sustained, as its own workers insist, by the people who have carried it on their shoulders through good times and bad.