About Rogers TV Lethbridge

Rogers TV Lethbridge

Overview

Rogers TV Lethbridge is the community television channel serving Lethbridge and southern Alberta on Rogers' cable network. It is the Lethbridge station of Rogers TV, the group of English-language community channels operated by Rogers Communications, and it gives the city a local channel of its own rather than a feed of the Rogers TV Ottawa anchor or of any other station: its schedule is built around programming produced in and for southern Alberta, mixing shows made by Rogers staff with access productions created by local organizations and independent community producers. The name on the channel is new, but the service is not. For most of its life the station was Shaw Cable's community channel for Lethbridge, branded first as Shaw TV and, from late 2018, as Shaw Spotlight. It became Rogers TV only after Rogers acquired Shaw in 2023 and folded the surviving western community channels into its own community channel group. Local sports talk, agricultural programming and public-affairs forums have been the channel's staples across all three identities.

History

Lethbridge's cable system was a Shaw property for decades: CRTC records from the mid-2000s list Shaw Cablesystems as the licensee of the cable undertaking serving Lethbridge, Alberta, alongside its other western systems. The community channel that came with that system developed as Shaw TV Lethbridge, with a local studio in the city. When cable community channels were audited for the CRTC around 2010–11, Lethbridge appeared in the record three times over — as a Shaw studio location in 1999, as a studio location independently confirmed in 2010, and in Shaw's own list of the community operations it committed to maintain — evidence that the Lethbridge channel had a standing local production base rather than a part-time presence.

The station was untouched by the sharpest cut in Shaw TV's history. In August 2017, following a CRTC policy change that let large cable companies in metropolitan markets redirect community-channel money toward their conventional local television stations, Shaw closed its community channels in Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton. Lethbridge, a smaller market outside that policy's scope, kept its channel. In late 2018 the Lethbridge station followed the rest of the western network in rebranding from Shaw TV to Shaw Spotlight, the name Shaw gave its community channels for the last five years of its ownership.

Ownership changed on 3 April 2023, when Rogers Communications completed its acquisition of Shaw. Shaw Spotlight was wound up in late 2023 and its channels were rebranded to and merged with Rogers TV. Lethbridge's channel accordingly took the Rogers TV name for the first time, gaining its own station page on the Rogers TV website, while its local production model — a small staff working with volunteers and community groups — carried over from the Shaw years.

Programming and Content

In the Shaw TV years, the Lethbridge channel's local slate was documented in the network's programming record. Its flagship magazine was go! Southern Alberta, a news and information program about events and activities across the region. Alongside it sat farm.tv, devoted to agricultural events in southern Alberta; televised sessions of SACPA, the Southern Alberta Council on Public Affairs, the city's long-running public-affairs forum; and A Public Education, featuring stories from the public education board and schools in southwestern Alberta. The mix was characteristic of Shaw's southern Alberta service: civic discussion, farm-country life and school stories rather than a conventional newscast.

Sport arrived mainly through Shaw's network properties. Shaw held the Western Hockey League's regional broadcast rights from 2003–04 through 2016–17, and its Friday night and playoff telecasts regularly featured the Lethbridge Hurricanes: the entire 2008 WHL Championship Series between Lethbridge and Spokane was televised live on Shaw TV across Western Canada, and regular-season schedules in the following years repeatedly carried Hurricanes home games from Lethbridge. Shaw also carried Canada West university football until 2016–17. Since the league's Shaw deal ended, WHL coverage has moved elsewhere, and the channel's sports identity has become more local and more talk-based.

That current identity is best documented by The Bullhorn: The Lethbridge Bulls Baseball Report, a weekly program about the Lethbridge Bulls of the Western Canadian Baseball League, hosted by Brent Radlinsky. Episodes work through interviews with Bulls players and coaches, game recaps, signings and events at Spitz Stadium; a May 2025 episode was devoted to the TCMM Memorial Game honouring Tanner Craswell and Mitch McLean, and a spring 2025 edition unveiled the club's 2025 City/Community Connect jerseys with the Bulls' owner and president as guest. The program described itself on air as a Rogers TV show throughout the 2025 Bulls season, and episodes from the spring of 2026 were still introducing it the same way — a small but concrete marker that Lethbridge-produced programming is being made for the channel today. Community access production remains the other half of the model: local groups pitch shows to the station, which are assessed by station staff on production capability, community involvement and distinctiveness, in line with the Rogers TV network's published access process.

Audience and Reach

The channel is available only to subscribers of Rogers' cable service in Lethbridge and the surrounding southern Alberta communities the system serves; community channels are not distributed by competing television providers or by satellite. Its potential audience is therefore the cable households of Alberta's third-largest city and its rural hinterland, not the general public, and no ratings or subscriber figures for the Lethbridge channel itself are published. None are claimed here. The agricultural and small-city focus of its documented programming reflects that footprint: this is a channel whose natural constituency runs from Lethbridge neighbourhoods out into the farm and ranch country of the southwest.

Digital Presence

The channel's digital home is its station page on the Rogers TV website, rogerstv.com/lethbridge, which carries its shows, schedules and community event listings alongside the rest of the Rogers TV network, and Rogers TV programming is also available through Rogers On Demand. Local productions extend their own reach online: The Bullhorn, for example, is distributed simultaneously as a podcast and through the Bulls' and baseball network channels on YouTube, so a program made for the cable channel circulates well beyond it. One piece of the older community-channel territory has migrated elsewhere: the City of Lethbridge now livestreams its council and committee meetings on the city's own YouTube channel, so civic-meeting coverage — once a staple of channels like this one — is no longer something viewers need Shaw's successor to provide.

Ownership and Organisation

Rogers TV Lethbridge is owned and operated by Rogers Communications, which acquired the channel with the rest of Shaw's cable and community television operations in April 2023. Production sits within Rogers' community television organization, staffed locally by producers and access coordinators and supplemented by trained volunteers and independent community producers. The service is funded through the community-channel contributions attached to Rogers' cable distribution licences. Shaw Spotlight's record on community television compliance was an issue in the CRTC's approval of the Rogers–Shaw transaction (Broadcasting Decision CRTC 2022-76), in which Rogers committed to bring the former Shaw service into full compliance with the community television policy and to keep it there. Rogers' subsequent corporate reporting on its community channels describes mentorship initiatives for Indigenous content creators across its community television footprint, including plans announced for 2025 to expand its Indigenous community ambassador program into western markets — the region in which the Lethbridge station operates.

Contact and Availability

Viewers in Lethbridge can find the channel on Rogers' local cable service, and its programs, schedules and local event listings are posted on its station page at rogerstv.com/lethbridge. Community organizations and residents interested in producing programming reach the station through the Rogers TV community access process via that page. The channel is not available through other television service providers, and some of its local shows — The Bullhorn among them — can also be heard or watched through the producers' own podcast and video channels.