About El Ocho Tucumán

El Ocho Tucumán

El Ocho Tucumán is the channel 8 television station of San Miguel de Tucumán, the capital of Tucumán Province in north-western Argentina. Broadcasting under the call sign LRK 458 TV, it has been on air since 8 December 1983 and is the second historic open channel of the province. For most of its life it was associated with Telefe, first as a partner in the consortium that created the network and from 2018 under the brand Telefe Tucumán. In 2023 Telefe sold the station to Grupo Televisión Litoral, and on 1 February that year it was rebranded elocho TV, the name it carries today, while continuing to broadcast Telefe programming. The station thus embodies two eras of Argentine television: the provincial partnerships that built Telefe, and the new regional groups now reshaping the interior networks.

From its studios in San Miguel de Tucumán the station serves Greater San Miguel and the province beyond, combining Telefe's national schedule with a tradition of local production that stretches back to the newscast it launched within months of signing on. Its documented local history is richer than most stations of its size: children's series, music programmes that ran for two decades, the province's first live sports broadcasts and an early-1990s historical miniseries all form part of its record.

Overview

The station broadcasts on analogue VHF channel 8 and digital channel 20, under ENACOM licence, and its website is elocho.tv. It is owned by Grupo Televisión Litoral, whose other stations include eltres TV in Rosario, elseis TV in Bariloche, elnueve TV in Bahía Blanca and elonce TV in Salta. Its programming affiliation remains Telefe, a combination, ownership by one group and programmes from a network historically owned by another, that has become common in Argentine interior television since the divestments of 2023. Its competitor in the city is Canal 10, the university-owned El Trece outlet, and between them the two stations divide the open-television audience of Argentina's most populous northern metropolitan area outside Córdoba.

History

Canal 8 signed on in 1983, with its first air date recorded as 8 December 1983, days before Argentina's return to democracy. Its first brand was TTC Canal 8, held from 1983 to 1993, after which it was known simply as Canal 8 until 2018. The station arrived seventeen years after Canal 10 and ended the older station's monopoly, giving Tucumán the two-channel structure it retains today.

The station's place in national television history was secured at the end of the 1980s. It was one of the members of the Televisión Federal S.A. consortium that acquired the licence for channel 11 in Buenos Aires when that station was privatised in 1989, the transaction that created Telefe. The Tucumán station was therefore not a mere affiliate of the new network but one of its founding provincial partners. It was the last of the group's stations to be fully integrated into Telefe, joining in March 2000, and it remained a Telefe owned station through the Telefónica, Viacom and Paramount eras.

In 2018, all of Telefe's interior stations dropped their channel-number branding in favour of city names, in preparation for the end of analogue television, and Canal 8 became Telefe Tucumán. The final change came in 2023, when Telefe sold the Tucumán station to Televisión Litoral, the owner of El Trece affiliates in Rosario and Bariloche. As a result the station rebranded as elocho TV on 1 February 2023, adopting the styling of its new sister stations, while its programme supply from Telefe continued.

Ownership

Grupo Televisión Litoral, the Rosario-based group built around El Tres, owns the station. Litoral's expansion in 2023, acquiring the former Telefe stations in Tucumán, Salta, Bahía Blanca and Neuquén, made it one of the principal regional television groups in Argentina, and its subsequent acquisition of Telefe itself through Televisión Federal has since reunited the Tucumán station's ownership and its programme network under the same corporate roof. The station's identity, however, is the local one the group promotes: elocho TV, a channel-number brand in the family's house style.

Programming

The schedule carries Telefe's national programming, the fiction, entertainment and news of Argentina's historically most-watched network. The station's own production record is unusually well documented. Its music programmes included Conexión Videos, Música Libre and Elegidos, the latter airing from 1987 to 2008. For children and teenagers it produced El Jardín de Florencia Flor, El Payaso Tapalín and Tevematch. Its first sports programme was Tercer Tiempo Comentado, and the station holds a provincial first: it was the first channel in Tucumán to air live sporting events. In the early 1990s it showed a miniseries set in seventeenth-century Tucumán, 100 Años Después, an early example of a provincial station attempting historical drama rooted in its own region's past.

The station also pioneered the rebroadcast of Buenos Aires journalism in the province, being the first channel in the area to relay national news programmes such as 28 Millones, later 30 Millones, Realidad 84, Redacción Abierta and Buenas Noches Argentina. That role, bringing the capital's current-affairs output to the north-west in the 1980s, preceded the modern network system and helped define the station's news identity.

News operation

Within a few months of beginning transmission, Canal 8 aired its first newscast, called 12 Minutos. The programme eventually grew into a one-hour show and its name changed to División Noticias. That early investment in news, made by a station only months old, established the pattern that has governed the station since: local news is its principal claim on the audience against both its local rival and the national networks. Under the Telefe Tucumán brand its news formed the local edition of the Telefe Noticias system, and under elocho TV it continues as the Litoral group's news operation for the province, in a market where television news remains a central arena of provincial politics.

Distribution and reach

The station's analogue signal on channel 8 and its digital assignment on channel 20 serve Greater San Miguel de Tucumán, with carriage on the cable systems of the capital and the province extending its reach. Tucumán's geography, a small, densely populated province with its population concentrated in and around the capital, means a single well-sited station covers the great majority of the provincial audience, and the two open stations compete head-to-head across almost the whole market.

Digital presence

The station's online home is elocho.tv, adopted with the 2023 rebrand, replacing its former presence as a local page of the Telefe network site. Through the site and the group's digital platforms its news and programmes circulate beyond the broadcast signal, in the pattern of regional Argentine television groups that now treat web and social distribution as a second newsroom front-end.

Audience and significance

El Ocho's significance rests on three pillars. It ended a seventeen-year monopoly and created Tucumán's enduring two-channel market in 1983. It was a founding partner of Telefe, one of the provincial stations whose consortium bought channel 11 in Buenos Aires in 1989, a reminder that Argentina's biggest network was built from the interior as well as the capital. And its 2023 sale and rebrand made it an early example of the post-Paramount geography of Argentine television, in which a Rosario group assembles the interior stations the global owners let go.

El Ocho today

Today elocho TV broadcasts Telefe programming and its own local production from San Miguel de Tucumán as part of Grupo Televisión Litoral, under the name El Ocho Tucumán by which the station is still catalogued. More than forty years after it signed on in the week Argentina returned to democracy, it remains one of the two television voices of the province, and the senior partner, by history, in the story of how the provinces helped to build Argentina's national networks.