About Canal 9 Río Gallegos

Canal 9 Río Gallegos

Canal 9 Río Gallegos is the provincial public television channel of Santa Cruz, in far southern Argentine Patagonia, broadcasting as LU 85 TV Canal 9 from the city of Río Gallegos, the provincial capital. Founded in 1968, it celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2018 and its fifty-eighth in 2026, making it one of the oldest provincial public stations in the country and a contemporary of Santa Cruz's own institutional consolidation as a province. It is operated by the provincial government and forms, together with LU 14 Radio Provincia, the public media system of Santa Cruz. In November 2021 it began permanent digital terrestrial broadcasting on channel 30.2 in Río Gallegos as the first stage of a province-wide digitalisation plan. This profile is flagged as comparatively thin in its early detail: the station's foundation year, its digital migration and its recent recovery programme are well documented in provincial sources, while its first decades are documented mainly through its preserved film archive, and that shape of the record is stated openly.

Foundation in 1968

The provincial government celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Canal 9 in 2018, which fixes the foundation of LU 85 TV Canal 9 in 1968, and the station marked its fifty-fourth anniversary in 2022, when LU 14 interviewed its manager Julio Mansilla about the celebration, and its fifty-eighth anniversary in 2026. The most concrete surviving evidence of its first decade is archival: the Archivo Histórico Provincial of Santa Cruz, located in the Complejo Cultural Santa Cruz, preserves a fund of 16 millimetre film material belonging to LU 85 TV Canal 9 covering the period 1968 to 1977, which was found in the basement of the Subsecretaría de Información Pública and sent to Buenos Aires in the year 2000 for cleaning and transfer to S-VHS as a master copy and to VHS for viewing and cataloguing, under a research account published by the Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia Austral. The same archive holds magnetic tapes in various formats whose content is unknown because playback equipment is not available. A public channel founded in 1968 in a city as remote as Río Gallegos was filming provincial life on 16 millimetre within its first years, and that film fund is the principal primary source for its early history.

A public channel for a vast province

Santa Cruz is one of Argentina's largest and most thinly populated provinces, stretching from the Atlantic coast to the Andes and from the Deseado massif to the southern continental tip, with population concentrated in Río Gallegos, Caleta Olivia and a scattering of small towns separated by hundreds of kilometres of steppe. A provincial television channel in that geography is not a city station with repeaters but a territorial integration instrument. An AFSCA-era survey of Argentine open television recorded LU 85 Canal 9 of Río Gallegos as a public station of the provincial state with two repeaters. The provincial president of the channel, Mario Borgna, expressed the doctrine behind it in 2018, on the fiftieth anniversary and during the recovery of the channel's space in the Cuenca Carbonífera, the coal basin around Río Turbio: one of the greatest acts of sovereignty a people can perform, he said, is to tell its own story, and the media must fulfil that role of telling ourselves our truths from our own cold, which is why the radio and the television channel matter for the basin and for telling the social reality made day by day. He added that the channel's mystique, like that of its sister radio LU 14, the most powerful in Patagonia in his phrase, was being felt again.

Sisterhood with LU 14 Radio Provincia

Canal 9's institutional sibling is LU 14 Radio Provincia de Santa Cruz, whose recorded archive of cassette material from 1991 to 2004 is also preserved by the Archivo Histórico Provincial, and whose news site carries the channel's institutional news, from anniversary interviews with its managers to its digitalisation announcements. Borgna in 2018 spoke explicitly of the brotherhood with the radio as no coincidence. The two provincial media share the mission of covering a province in which many localities receive provincial news principally through the state radio and television system, a point the provincial governor repeated in 2026 when delivering equipment to the channel, observing that in small localities many neighbours inform themselves through the channel's signal. That shared structure, one provincial radio network and one provincial television channel under the same government communication secretariat, is the standard Santa Cruz model and explains why the channel's announcements appear on the radio's platforms.

The Patagonian network and Resumen Patagónico

Canal 9 is a member of the Red Patagónica de la Televisión Pública and emits the Resumen Patagónico de Noticias, the Patagonian News Summary produced jointly by the network's public channels. Provincial reporting records that the initiative had its first emission in September 2016, specifically on 17 September 2016, and is broadcast on Saturdays at 13:00 on LU 85 TV Canal 9. The summary brings together news from the public channels of Tierra del Fuego, Chubut, Río Negro, La Pampa, Neuquén and Santa Cruz, giving viewers a regional news breadth across the whole of Patagonia, and the network's members agreed to work on a shared content bank and on the joint transmission of cultural, tourist and sporting events. For Santa Cruz's channel, the network multiplies its reach and its programme supply at once: its own stories travel to five other provincial screens, and its Saturday schedule gains a regional newscast it could not produce alone.

Digitalisation from November 2021

On 8 November 2021 the channel announced that, within the process of digitalisation of the Santa Cruz public channel, LU 85 TV Canal 9 had begun test emissions and its programming was permanently available on the digital terrestrial television system on channel 30.2 in the city of Río Gallegos, and throughout the country via ARSAT-1 through the satellite digital television system, TDS. The announcement presented public television in the province as advancing to guarantee information, education, culture, sport and entertainment with a Santa Cruz identity, in open, free and gratuitous access. The terrestrial digital network's physical infrastructure is developed and maintained by the state company ARSAT throughout the country, and in Santa Cruz under a contract with Canal 9. The staged plan stated that in the following weeks reception by TDA would reach Caleta Olivia and Río Turbio, then the most populated localities through ARSAT digital terrestrial stations at Puerto Deseado, Comandante Luis Piedra Buena, El Calafate, Pico Truncado and Puerto San Julián. During 2022 the analogue repeaters of the remaining localities were to be replaced by the channel's own digital stations, and before the end of 2022 the digitalisation process was to be completed with the definitive migration of the channel's transmission entirely to high definition. This profile records that schedule as the announced plan of November 2021; provincial sources consulted do not include a completion audit, and the plan is not presented here as verified completion.

Programming and provincial identity

The channel's programming mission, as stated in its digitalisation announcement, is information, education, culture, sport and entertainment with Santa Cruz identity. Named productions in provincial coverage include Santa Cruz Profunda, whose second season was launched at the César Virgilio auditorium in Río Gallegos with the provincial Secretary of Tourism describing it as reflecting collective work and strengthening identity through public media. Sport occupies a documented place: its president in 2026 highlighted the transmissions of the Liga Independiente de Fútbol de los Barrios, the independent neighbourhood football league, as a proposal of great importance for the audience that follows it every Sunday and for the technical and human work each coverage from different points of Río Gallegos requires. He also confirmed that Canal 9 would transmit all the Argentina national team's matches at the coming World Cup through Televisión Pública, together with the opening and closing ceremonies and decisive matches. Those items, tourism magazine, neighbourhood football and national team football through the public network, fairly represent the real schedule economy of a small Patagonian public channel: local identity production, community sport and national public content.

Recovery and investment in 2026

By its fifty-eighth anniversary in 2026 the channel was in a stated stage of recovery. Its president, Marcelo Zaccaria, told LU 14 that the channel had passed through many years of a complex situation but was in a stage of recovery thanks to the effort of workers across the province, highlighting the growth of its digital platforms and the incorporation of a twenty-four-hour online signal that also allows the radio to be heard from the channel's official website. In October 2026 Governor Claudio Vidal, accompanied by the Minister Secretary General Soledad Boggio and the Government Minister Belén Elmiger, delivered equipment to LU 85 TV Canal 9 including Shure and wireless microphones, latest-generation Samsung mobile phones, two professional Sony video cameras, tripods and two Ford Ranger pickup trucks, and announced agreement with Zaccaria to incorporate further equipment within twenty to thirty days. Vidal stated that the objective was to recover the programming and expand the channel's capacity to bring information to the whole province, and that recovering the channel after many years would take a little time but that its teams were doing great work, not only in the news programme but in all its programmes. That investment is recorded here as provincial government reporting of October 2026.

Assessment and limits of the record

Canal 9 Río Gallegos is flagged as a thin-record station for its early and middle history. Verified here are its identity as LU 85 TV Canal 9, its provincial public ownership, its foundation in 1968 fixed by its fiftieth anniversary in 2018, its 16 millimetre film archive for 1968 to 1977, its two repeaters in the AFSCA-era survey, its membership of the Patagonian public network and its Saturday Resumen Patagónico since September 2016, its digital launch on channel 30.2 in November 2021 with its staged province-wide plan, its named programmes and its 2026 recovery and equipment delivery. Not verified in the available sources are its founding act and first director, its studio address, its analogue history in detail and audited completion of the 2022 HD migration. On the verified record, it stands as Santa Cruz's public channel since 1968, the audiovisual memory of a young province, now rebuilding its technical base.