About Canal 7 Neuquén

Canal 7 Neuquén

Canal 7 Neuquén is the free-to-air television station of the city of Neuquén, capital of the province of Neuquén in Argentine Patagonia, broadcasting as LU 84 TV. A Telefe affiliate operated since 2023 by Alpha Media, it serves the Alto Valle del Río Negro, the densely populated Neuquén and Río Negro valley corridor that includes the cities of Neuquén, Cipolletti, General Roca and their surrounding towns, and reaches the whole province of Neuquén through repeaters. It was the first open television channel in the Comahue region and for a quarter of a century formed part of the Telefe network as an owned station before being sold, in January 2023, as part of Paramount's withdrawal from Argentina's interior stations. Its present public name is Canal 7 Neuquén and its slogan is Siempre juntos.

Adjudication and launch

On 10 October 1963, by Decree 9071, the National Executive awarded Neuquén TV S.A. a licence to operate on Channel 7 in the city of Neuquén. The company was made up of 25 partners, among whom Alfredo Suárez, Osvaldo Pianciola, Rodolfo Riavitz and Víctor Eddi stood out; other accounts name Pianciola as a shareholder, Alfredo Sánchez as the first general manager and Rodolfo Riavitz as the first president. Neuquén TV originally planned to begin transmissions on 12 September 1965, coinciding with the sixty-first anniversary of the founding of the provincial capital, but the launch was postponed to December. The licence finally began regular transmissions on 5 December 1965 as LU 84 TV Canal 7 de Neuquén. Canal 7 was the first open television channel of the Comahue, and its studios stood beside National Route 22, next to the monument to Ceferino Namuncurá, a location whose traffic noise later had to be edited out of programmes, as the station's own historical notes recall.

First years, new studios and repeaters

On 13 February 1967 the Deliberative Council of the City of Neuquén authorised the sale of two hectares of Chacra 138, municipal property, for two million pesos to Neuquén TV for the construction of the channel's new headquarters. Those facilities, facing the Plaza de las Banderas on the street that bears the Riavitz name, were inaugurated on 1 February 1969 and are the ones the channel still uses. In 1970 Canal 7 installed its first repeater, at El Chocón, whose regular operation was authorised on 22 April 1971 after its installations were verified. Also in 1970 the channel signed an agreement with Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales under which the state oil company advanced it 200,000 pesos in commercial and institutional advertising in exchange for the installation of a repeater covering Catriel, where the relay station was eventually installed, and 25 de Mayo, reflecting how closely the growth of Patagonian television followed the oil economy of the valley. In 1979 the channel began experimental colour broadcasts, and in 1988 it began transmitting its programming by satellite. On 12 November 1982, by Decree 1207, the National Executive renewed the licence.

Entry into Telefe and successive sales

Canal 7 was connected to the creation of Telefe itself. When President Carlos Menem ordered the privatisation of Buenos Aires Channels 11 and 13 on 21 September 1989, one of the bidders was Televisión Federal S.A., Telefe, whose shareholders at that time included Televisoras Provinciales S.A., of which Neuquén TV, the Canal 7 licensee, was itself a shareholder. The Canal 11 licence ultimately went to Televisión Federal and took effect on 15 January 1990. During the 1990s the shares of Neuquén TV were sold several times. Accounts of the station's former owners record that in 1992 Pianciola, the Riavitz family and the remaining partners sold the signal to a group including Martín Lecuona, DiCor, licensee of Canal 8 of Córdoba, Juan Cristóbal Roberts and Santiago Soldati. By 1997 the shares were in the hands of Dicor Difusión Córdoba S.A. and Pedro Simoncini, whose entry as shareholders was authorised by national decree on 2 September 1998. In April 1998 Televisoras Provinciales sold its stake in Televisión Federal to Atlántida Comunicaciones, and seven of its ten member companies, including Neuquén TV, accepted the Atlántida offer for their licences, the Neuquén transaction being completed in September 1998 so that the channel became part of Grupo Telefe. The formal transfer of the licence to Telefe was approved only on 30 March 2017, almost nineteen years later.

Telefónica, the Media Law and Viacom

On 30 November 1999 Constancio Vigil, general director of Atlántida Comunicaciones, announced that Grupo Telefónica, which held 30 percent of the company, would buy 100 percent of Telefe, seven interior channels including Canal 7, and the Continental and FM Hit radio stations for approximately 530 million United States dollars. The transaction was approved by the competition authority on 19 April 2000 and completed on 19 May 2000. Under the Audiovisual Communication Services Law, Telefe presented a voluntary adaptation plan on 6 December 2012 proposing to sell Canal 7 and Canal 9 of Bahía Blanca; the plan was approved on 16 December 2014, leaving both channels for sale, but Decree 267 of 2015 removed the national coverage limit, ENACOM archived all adaptation plans on 2 February 2016, and Telefe retained its interior channels. In October 2013 workers at Canal 7 and other regional media in the SATSAID union struck over a 40 percent remote-area salary supplement, a dispute settled on 12 December 2013 with the supplement phased in at 14 percent from January 2014, 28 percent from January 2015 and 40 percent from January 2016. On 3 November 2016 the United States group Viacom agreed to buy Telefe and its channels, including Canal 7, for 345 million United States dollars, completing the purchase on 15 November 2016, with ENACOM approving the transfer on 30 March 2017. CBS and Viacom merged on 4 December 2019, bringing the station under ViacomCBS, later Paramount.

Digital transition and the Telefe Neuquén name

On 12 February 1999, by Resolution 3454, the Secretariat of Communications authorised Canal 7 to test digital terrestrial television under the ATSC standard on VHF channel 8. On 30 August 2011 AFSCA Resolution 1033 authorised tests under the ISDB-T standard on UHF channel 38. On 8 January 2015 the Government of the Province of Neuquén began migrating the satellite data feeding the repeaters of Canal 7, together with services including the state Radio y Televisión del Neuquén, from the AMC-6 satellite to ARSAT-1, becoming the first provincial state client to migrate all its data to the Argentine satellite launched in October 2014; by July 2015 all provincial repeaters received the channel from ARSAT-1. On 4 June 2015 AFSCA Resolution 381 assigned Canal 7 digital channel 29.1 for regular HD broadcasting on digital terrestrial television. On 21 November 2018, as part of a strategic change ahead of the analogue switch-off, Telefe's interior channels replaced their frequency-based commercial identity with the Telefe name, and Canal 7 became Telefe Neuquén, the name it used from 2018 to 2023. On 21 December 2021 Telefe Neuquén became the seventh channel of the Telefe group to transmit in HD. It broadcasts in 1080i.

Sale to Alpha Media and return to Canal 7

On 31 January 2023 Telefe sold the station to Alpha Media, the group of Marcelo Figoli, so that the channel ceased to be owned by the network and became only an affiliate station, resuming its former name of Canal 7 and reusing the logo used between 2011 and 2018. Trade coverage by TAVI Latam described the sale as the second interior channel divested by Paramount in a short period, after Canal 8 of Mar del Plata, and as Alpha Media's debut in television, since the group was previously known for radio stations including Radio Rivadavia, Rock and Pop, Metro, Blue and La Uno, the Noticias Argentinas news agency and the magazine Newsweek in Argentina. The agreement kept Telefe content on the channel in affiliate status and provided for joint commercial exploitation of advertising space. Figoli stated that the group would concentrate on consolidating the channel's leadership in the province through strong, quality local programming linked with the group's radios, magazines and portals. In June 2023 the group created Radio 7, an FM station linked to the channel. On 29 June 2023 the channel ceased analogue broadcasting and completed its transition to digital terrestrial television in southern Argentina under ENACOM Decree 156 of 2022.

Programming then and now

In its beginnings the station broadcast only four hours a day, including a fifteen-minute newscast with information supplied by the newspaper Clarín, imported series such as Bonanza and Bewitched, foreign films and sporting events. Today most of the schedule consists of retransmitting the generalist, family-oriented programming of Canal 11 of Buenos Aires, head of the Telefe network. Local production is headed by its news service, now Noticias 7, formerly presented as Telefe Noticias Neuquén, which has two weekday editions at 13:00 and 20:00 and is described as the most watched newscast in the Alto Valle, and by Patagonia Telebingo, a bingo game also broadcast by Canal 6 of Bariloche and Canal 10 of General Roca. Earlier local programmes remembered in the station's record include the morning newscast A Diario, produced by the state Radio y Televisión del Neuquén, the magazine Tarde Mix, and the Federal Martín Fierro award winners De la misma tierra, a documentary cycle, El Mirador, a general interest programme, and Rica Patagonia, a gastronomy programme. The station's stated coverage covers the Alto Valle, the city and province of Neuquén, Catriel in Río Negro and the southwest of La Pampa province by air and cable, and the whole of Argentina by satellite.

Place in the Comahue

The Universidad Nacional del Comahue's regional communication museum treats Canal 7 as a central artefact of how television arrived in the valley, noting its 1980 consolidation of colour, its passage to Telefe in the 1990s and its acquisition by Alpha Media in 2023. That long arc, from a 25-partner local company beside a national highway to an asset traded between Telefónica, Viacom and Paramount and finally to an Argentine radio-led group, is the history of Argentine interior television in miniature. Throughout it, the constant has been the valley audience: an oil, fruit-growing and university region whose two provinces share one television market centred on Neuquén city, and for whom Canal 7 has been, since 5 December 1965, the home signal.

Present position

Canal 7 Neuquén today operates from its 1969 headquarters in Neuquén city under Alpha Media S.A., broadcasts in high definition on digital terrestrial television, retains its Telefe affiliation, maintains its website at c7neuquen.com.ar, and in June 2023 added a linked FM radio station, Radio 7. Its documentary record is among the fullest of any Argentine interior station, with licence decrees, share transfers, satellite migration and programme history all traceable in public sources. No verified audience or revenue figures were found for this profile and none are stated. On the evidence available, it remains the reference television station of the Alto Valle and the Comahue.