About Canal 11 Salta

Canal 11 Salta

Canal 11 Salta is a free-to-air television station serving the city and province of Salta in north-western Argentina. Broadcasting on channel 11 under the call sign LW 82 TV, it has been on air since 1 April 1966 and is one of the historic stations of the Argentine north-west. For most of its life it was a Telefe owned station, known from 2018 as Telefe Salta. In 2023 it was sold to Grupo Televisión Litoral and rebranded elonce TV, the name it now carries, while continuing to broadcast Telefe programming. Its news service, Notionce, is described in reference listings as the news centre of the north-west of the interior of the country, with four editions from Monday to Friday and a full roster of weekend editions, an unusually intensive news operation for a provincial station.

The station is seen across part of Salta Province through a network of repeaters reaching Orán, Tartagal, Rosario de la Frontera and El Tunal, serving a province of Andean valleys, subtropical lowlands and frontier cities whose distances make a regional television service a practical necessity. From its base in the provincial capital, one of Argentina's best-preserved colonial cities, Canal 11 has documented Salta's public life for nearly six decades.

Overview

Canal 11 broadcasts on analogue VHF channel 11 from Salta, under ENACOM licence, and is owned by Televisión Litoral S.A. It carries programmes from Telefe, and also carries the bingo broadcasts of Canal Siete Jujuy, a cross-border arrangement with the neighbouring province's station that reflects the integrated media market of the Argentine north-west. Its current brand is elonce TV, styled elonceTV, within the Litoral group's family of numbered stations alongside eltres, elseis, elocho and elnueve. Its listed website is the group's elonce TV page. The name Canal 11 Salta, used in this profile, was the station's own name from 1966 to 2018 and remains its common catalogue name.

History

The licence was awarded on 9 December 1963, when the National Executive, by Decree 1337, granted the company Compañía de Radio y Televisión S.A., then in formation and made up of fifteen people, a licence to exploit the channel 11 frequency in the city of Salta. The licence began regular transmissions on 1 April 1966 as LW 82 TV Canal 11 de Salta. It thus belongs, like its Tucumán and Bahía Blanca contemporaries, to the founding generation of Argentine interior television.

The station's early decades were marked by steady technical growth. On 31 August 1973, by Decree 980, the national government authorised the entry of forty-four further people into the licensee company. On 1 May 1980 Canal 11 began broadcasting its programming in colour. Its repeater network grew with it: on 1 December 1980 the repeater in Rosario de la Frontera was inaugurated, and on 1 March 1981 the retransmitter at Tartagal began operating. Further changes in the licensee's composition were authorised in 1983 and by Decree 2094 of 11 November 1986, which admitted Martín Patrón Costas, Héctor Cornejo D'Andrea and Horacio Patrón Costas, names associated with one of Salta's historic landowning and political families.

The station joined the Telefe system in April 1998 as an owned station, when Editorial Atlántida acquired a majority of the former Televisoras Provinciales. It passed with Telefe through the Telefónica period, an episode in which COMFER in November 2001 ordered Telefónica to choose between its overlapping stations, a process that ended with Telefónica keeping Telefe and its affiliates. When Argentina changed its digital system choice to ISDB-T in 2009, Canal 11 selected UHF channel 39, and on 4 June 2015 AFSCA, by Resolution 381, granted the station UHF channel 20.1 to broadcast its digital signal in high definition. On 3 November 2016 Viacom announced its acquisition of Telefe and its stations for 345 million dollars, completed on 15 November and approved by ENACOM on 30 March 2017, making Salta's channel part of the Viacom, later Paramount, group. In November 2018 Telefe rebranded its interior stations by city name, and the longtime Canal 11 became Telefe Salta. The final change came on 29 September 2023, when the acquisition of the channel by Grupo Televisión Litoral was confirmed; on 2 October 2023 it was renamed elonce TV.

Ownership

The station is owned by Televisión Litoral S.A., the Rosario-based Grupo Televisión Litoral, which acquired it from Telefe in 2023 along with the group's other smaller interior stations. The Litoral group, associated with Gustavo Scaglione, controls television stations in Rosario, Bariloche, Tucumán and Bahía Blanca, the La Capital newspaper of Rosario and El Diario of Paraná among other assets, and has since also become owner of Telefe itself. For Salta, the change replaced a global media owner, Paramount, with an Argentine regional group for whom the station is a core asset rather than a peripheral holding.

Programming

The schedule is built on Telefe's national programming, supplemented by the station's own production and by the bingo broadcasts of Canal Siete Jujuy carried under its affiliation arrangements. Local production is concentrated in news, in keeping with the economics of provincial television and with the station's self-presentation as a news centre for the north-west. The volume of that news production, set out below, is the station's most distinctive feature: few Argentine provincial stations sustain as many daily editions.

News operation

Notionce is the station's information service. Reference listings describe it as the news centre of the north-west of the country's interior, with four editions from Monday to Friday: a morning edition from 7:00 to 9:00, an afternoon edition following the network magazine Corta por Lozano, a central edition at 20:00 and a night edition at midnight. Weekends carry a full parallel roster: Notionce en la Mañana, Notionce Primera Edición at midday, Notionce Segunda Edición as the central edition, and Notionce a la Medianoche on Saturdays, with Notionce Previo, Edición Uno and evening editions on Sundays. A newsroom sustaining that grid is, in effect, a rolling news operation for the province, covering Salta's government, its courts and police, its tourism and wine economies in the Calchaquí Valleys, and the frontier life of the northern cities its repeaters serve.

Distribution and reach

The station is seen in part of Salta Province through four repeaters recorded in reference listings: channel 6 at Cerro Cantera for San Ramón de la Nueva Orán, channel 12 at El Tunal, channel 9 at Pozo Verde for Rosario de la Frontera and channel 5 at Tartagal. That network maps the province's population geography, from the capital in the Lerma Valley to the subtropical north on the Bolivian frontier. Its digital terrestrial signal was assigned to UHF 20.1 for high-definition broadcast in 2015, and cable carriage across the province completes a distribution system built over six decades from the first Rosario de la Frontera repeater of 1980 onward.

Digital presence

The station's listed web presence is the Grupo Televisión Litoral page for elonce TV, and its news output circulates through the group's digital platforms. Under Telefe it had formed part of the network's national digital structure; under Litoral it is presented within the group's own sites, in line with the rebrand that made its digital identity match its sister stations.

Audience and significance

Canal 11 is one of the institutions that created modern Salta's public sphere: on air since 1966, in colour since 1980, and possessed of a news operation of unusual depth. Its history also condenses the ownership saga of Argentine television, from a local licence company of fifteen founders, through the Patron Costas era, Atlántida, Telefónica, Viacom and Paramount, to an Argentine regional group. Each change of owner in Buenos Aires or abroad was registered in Salta as a change in the name above the same channel 11 door: Canal 11, Telefe Salta, elonce TV.

Canal 11 today

Today the station broadcasts as elonce TV from Salta, owned by Televisión Litoral, carrying Telefe programmes and producing Notionce for the province and the north-west. The name Canal 11 Salta belongs to its longest chapter, from 1966 to 2018, and the station it names remains what it has been throughout: the senior television service of Salta, and one of the senior stations of the Argentine interior.