About Rogers TV Gander

Rogers TV Gander

Overview

Rogers TV Gander is the community cable channel for Gander, Newfoundland and Labrador, carried on channel 9 of the Rogers cable system in the town and the surrounding central Newfoundland communities of its service area. It belongs to Rogers TV, the network of English-language community channels operated by Rogers Communications, but it is a distinct local outlet rather than a relay of the network's Ottawa anchor or of the St. John's station: it serves its own zone within the CRTC's zone-based framework for community channels in Newfoundland and Labrador, and it has its own locally made programming, centred on Skyways, Gander's long-running community talk show. Around that local core, the channel follows the Rogers TV community model — programming produced by a small staff with volunteers and community partners, access programming proposed by local residents and organizations, municipal politics coverage, charity telethons and televised bingo — mixed with programmes shared across the Newfoundland and Labrador systems, several of them produced in St. John's. The channel is available only to Rogers cable subscribers in the Gander area, with its listings published in the Gander section of rogerstv.com, and reference listings continue to describe Skyways, hosted by Gina Brown, as the station's current local programme.

History

Community television in Gander began under the town's local cable operator, Omni Cablevision. In 1990 the Gander system joined with the cable systems in St. John's (Avalon Cablevision), Grand Falls-Windsor (Central Cable) and Corner Brook (Shellbird Cable) to form the new Cable Atlantic system, and Cable Atlantic was sold to Rogers Cable in 2000, bringing Gander's community channel into the Rogers fold. The channel then took the network's successive identities: the community stations were rebranded as Rogers Television in February 2002, renamed Rogers TV in April 2008, and relaunched under refreshed branding on 1 September 2016.

The channel's regulatory footing was set by the CRTC's Atlantic Canada decisions. In 2006 the Commission brought Rogers' Newfoundland and Labrador community channels into a zone-based structure under its regional cable licence, under which each zone's channel is expected to devote the majority of its schedule to programming produced in its own area. Broadcasting Decision CRTC 2014-204 later amalgamated Rogers' Atlantic distribution licences into regional licences, and Broadcasting Decision CRTC 2018-265 maintained the conditions of licence relating to the zone-based community channels in Newfoundland and Labrador. When Rogers closed its community stations in the Greater Toronto Area in 2017, the Atlantic channels, Gander among them, continued; the trade publication Broadcast Dialogue reported that year that Rogers TV was eliminating four jobs across its St. John's, Corner Brook and Gander operations, with the company saying the changes would not affect programming. The Gander channel has remained part of the network's station line-up since, listed on channel 9 with Skyways named as its local talk show.

Programming and Content

Skyways is the programme that gives the Gander channel its local identity: a talk show focused on community events in and around the town, which reference listings describe as hosted by Gina Brown. The show is long-established — in a statement in the House of Commons on 24 October 2011, Scott Simms, then the member of Parliament for the area, named Skyways alongside Grand Central and Out of the Fog as examples of the local programming Rogers TV was producing in Newfoundland and Labrador. Alongside the talk show, the channel carries two fixtures of community television in the province: televised bingo in support of the local Lion's Club, and bi-annual charity telethons, which the Gander station has held together with its counterparts in Grand Falls-Windsor and Corner Brook in support of organizations including the Children's Wish Foundation, the SPCA, the Kiwanis Club and the Lion's Club.

As at every Newfoundland and Labrador station in the network, the Gander channel airs local municipal politics coverage for its own area. Its schedule is rounded out by programmes shared across the province's Rogers TV systems, among them One Chef One Critic and the puppet-hosted talk show NL NOW, both produced in St. John's, and since 2011 Rogers TV has shared most of its St. John's programming with Eastlink's community channel in the province, so productions move between the two services. Election coverage is part of that shared provincial output: for the October 2025 election season Rogers TV's Newfoundland and Labrador service produced a municipal election results show on 2 October 2025 and a provincial election results show on 14 October 2025, carried across its systems. The balance of the schedule follows the network's access model: shows produced by Rogers staff sit alongside programming proposed by community members and organizations, with the majority of programming produced in the station's own region and production carried out by staff working with volunteers and community partners.

Audience and Reach

Rogers TV Gander can be seen only by subscribers to the Rogers cable service in Gander and its surrounding service area, on channel 9; it is not distributed by other television providers and is not available over the air. The channel's practical footprint is the central Newfoundland territory Rogers serves from Gander: when Rogers TV announced its broadcast areas for St. John's IceCaps hockey in 2014, it defined its Central region as Botwood, Peterview, Carmanville, Gander, Grand Falls and Bishops Falls — the cluster of communities for which Gander, a town of 11,880 people at the 2021 census and the service centre for this part of the island, is the hub. Rogers does not publish ratings or audience figures for its individual community channels, and no Gander-specific audience measurement is released; the figure the service publishes — more than 2.3 million cable subscribers reached across the regions where Rogers operates cable systems — is a network total given by Rogers TV itself, not a measure of this channel's viewership.

Digital Presence

The channel's online home is the Gander section of rogerstv.com, where its programme listings and show pages are published in the same format as every other Rogers TV community channel; the station's inventoried address is rogerstv.com/gander/shows. Some Rogers TV programming is also distributed through the Rogers On Demand service, and the network's Rogers tv YouTube channel carries productions from its regional services, including the Newfoundland and Labrador election results programmes of October 2025 described above. Because rogerstv.com has been blocked to automated research tools throughout this project, the fine detail of the Gander channel's streamed and on-demand offerings should be sighted on the live site at publish time; the channel's current operation is independently supported by the network's current station and programme listings and by the regulatory record set out in this profile.

Ownership and Organisation

Rogers TV Gander is owned and operated by Rogers Communications through its cable division, as part of the Rogers TV network of English-language community channels; the network's French-language counterpart is TV Rogers. Canadian community channels operate inside a CRTC framework under which cable companies devote a portion of their revenues to community programming that is expected to reflect the local community, and in Newfoundland and Labrador Rogers delivers that obligation through zone-based channels whose conditions of licence were maintained by the Commission in 2018. The Gander channel works to the network's common model — Rogers TV branding, standards and regional management for the Newfoundland and Labrador service, with local production carried out by a small staff together with volunteers and community partners — and its local output, such as Skyways and its charity broadcasts, is produced for the Gander zone rather than fed from another station.

Contact and Availability

Rogers TV Gander is available on channel 9 for Rogers cable subscribers in Gander and the surrounding communities of its service area, as part of the basic cable service; it cannot be received from other providers. Programme listings, show information, and details on volunteering or proposing a programme are published through the channel's section of the Rogers TV website, rogerstv.com/gander. The channel does not publish a general public business email address, and none is listed in this profile.