About Rogers TV Saint John

Rogers TV Saint John

Overview

Rogers TV Saint John is the English-language community cable channel serving Saint John, New Brunswick, carried on channel 10 for subscribers of the Rogers cable system in the port city and its surrounding communities. It is one local channel within Rogers TV, the network of community channels owned by Rogers Communications, but it is a distinct outlet in its own right: the community channel for Rogers' Saint John service area, one of the zone-based community channels the company operates across New Brunswick, with its own production base and its own local programming record. It is not the Ottawa channel under another name, nor a feed of Rogers' Moncton station — a CRTC decision record describes Rogers distributing each of its New Brunswick community channels only in the region it is considered local to. Saint John also holds a special place in the province's community television history: it was one of the first two New Brunswick cities where cable community channels were established in the early 1970s. The channel's best-known content was sport — for seven seasons it was the television home of the Saint John Sea Dogs of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League — and its schedule today follows the network's community model of staff-produced programming, community access shows, civic coverage and specials, made with volunteers and local partners. It has no over-the-air signal and is available only on Rogers cable in its own zone. Its program listings live in the Saint John section of the Rogers TV website, rogerstv.com/saint-john.

History

Cable companies have offered community channels in New Brunswick for more than forty years, and Saint John was there at the start: Fundy Cable began setting up community channels in Saint John and Edmundston in the early 1970s, among the first in the province. In 1998 two things happened that shaped the modern service — Shaw Cable acquired the New Brunswick cable licences from Fundy Cable, and the province's local community programming stations were grouped as TVNB, described as the first provincial programming network in Canada not owned by a provincial government. Rogers and Shaw exchanged cable assets in 2000, and the New Brunswick stations were rebranded to Rogers Television in February 2002. The network became Rogers TV in April 2008, with the French-language stations renamed TV Rogers, and was relaunched with a new logo and on-air presentation on 1 September 2016.

The Saint John channel's scale in that era is documented in Broadcasting Decision CRTC 2014-204. When Rogers amalgamated its Atlantic Canadian distribution licences into seven licences aligned with its community programming zones — approved by the Commission — it also asked to fund a second, French-language community channel in the Saint John and Fredericton service areas. The CRTC denied that request on 1 May 2014, pointing to the small size of the markets and of their francophone minority populations (5,230 people, or 4.1 percent, in Saint John on 2011 census figures). The decision records that the Saint John and Fredericton channels then distributed on average about ten hours of programming a day, of which roughly one hour was original, and notes the intervenor's observation that Saint John programming never began before 4 p.m. on weekends. In 2017, when Rogers closed its Greater Toronto Area community stations after a CRTC policy change allowed metropolitan operators to redirect community-channel funding to local news, the New Brunswick channels in small and medium-sized markets continued, Saint John's among them.

Programming and Content

Sport made the Saint John channel's reputation. The Saint John Sea Dogs joined the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League in 2005, and Rogers TV carried the club on channel 10 — though after the 2010 President Cup final between Saint John and Moncton, locally produced QMJHL telecasts disappeared from the channel for several years. They returned in 2015-16: the Sea Dogs announced a Rogers TV schedule of nineteen games that season, fifteen of them originating from Harbour Station (now TD Station), and the club's full television release counted more than twenty-five Rogers TV New Brunswick broadcasts into Saint John, including road games produced in Bathurst and Moncton and carried across the province on channel 10. Through the seasons that followed, the New Brunswick stations aired roughly fifteen to twenty-five games per team per season as a shared provincial sports service, and during the Sea Dogs' 2017 President Cup final run, games one, five and seven were broadcast on Rogers TV throughout New Brunswick. The arrangement ended after the pandemic-shortened 2020-21 season: in September 2021, Rogers TV New Brunswick broadcaster Gerry Green confirmed the stations would not carry QMJHL games from Saint John, Moncton or Bathurst that season, closing a seven-season run.

Around the hockey, and since, the Saint John schedule carries the strands typical of the New Brunswick service: the Rogers tv Community News strand, civic and election programming such as the province-wide NB Municipal Vote 2026, community events, and podcast-format shows produced in the city. Among the current catalogue's Saint John productions is The Port Podcast, Port Saint John's own program, hosted by port chief executive Craig Estabrooks with Cait Milberry, whose conversations about the working waterfront — with guests from the Coast Guard, Moosehead Breweries and the city's members of the Legislative Assembly — continued through 2025. As elsewhere in the network, community members can propose access programming, which is reviewed at the station level and produced with staff support and volunteers.

Audience and Reach

Rogers TV Saint John reaches viewers only through the Rogers cable system in the Saint John zone, on channel 10; it is not carried by other television providers and cannot be received over the air. When the CRTC dismissed a carriage complaint from the independent community station CHCO-TV in 2020, it described Rogers as operating six different community channels in New Brunswick and distributing each in a separate region, treating Rogers TV and the local station as comparable local services — the clearest regulatory statement of the zone structure that defines the Saint John channel's footprint. During the Sea Dogs years, that footprint widened for hockey: telecasts produced in Saint John were shown on Rogers TV across New Brunswick, and Saint John viewers in turn saw games produced in Bathurst and Moncton. Rogers publishes no ratings for individual community channels and releases no Saint John viewing figures; network-wide, Rogers TV reports serving more than 2.3 million cable subscribers in Rogers' cable regions, a figure published for the network as a whole and not a measurement of this channel's audience.

Digital Presence

The channel's online home is its Saint John section of rogerstv.com, which publishes its show pages and schedules in the same format as the network's other communities. Some programming is also available through the Rogers On Demand service, and productions made for the channel circulate online through their producers — The Port Podcast, for example, is published on podcast platforms and YouTube as well as appearing in the Rogers TV catalogue. Because rogerstv.com is blocked to automated research tools, the current detail of the Saint John channel's streamed offerings and any city-specific social accounts should be re-verified against the live site at publish time; the channel's operation and local productions are independently documented in the club, regulatory and community records described in this profile.

Ownership and Organisation

Rogers TV Saint John is owned and operated by Rogers Communications through its cable division, as part of the Rogers TV network of English-language community channels; its French-language counterpart service is TV Rogers, which operates its own stations in New Brunswick's francophone markets. Community channels exist within a CRTC framework that requires cable companies to devote a portion of subscription revenue to community programming reflecting the local community, and in New Brunswick Rogers delivers that programming through zone-based channels aligned with its distribution licences — the structure approved when the Commission amalgamated Rogers' Atlantic licences in 2014. Locally, the Saint John station works to the network model: a small staff supplemented by volunteers and community partners, shows produced in the region, and residents able to apply to develop programming of their own, under the network's common branding and regional management for New Brunswick.

Contact and Availability

Rogers TV Saint John is available to Rogers cable subscribers in Saint John and its surrounding service area on channel 10, as part of the basic cable service; it is not available from other television providers. Program schedules, show information and community program proposal information are published through the Saint John section of rogerstv.com. The channel does not publish a general public business email address, and none is listed in this profile.