About Telefe Rosario

Telefe Rosario

Telefe Rosario is an Argentine free-to-air station broadcasting from Rosario, Santa Fe. It is the Telefe affiliate for the city, known for most of its life simply as Canal 5, with call sign LT 84 TV. It broadcasts on analogue channel 5, serving Greater Rosario and the north of Buenos Aires province. Its owner is listed as Grupo Televisión Litoral, operated through Grupo Telefe and Televisión Federal S.A. Its studios are on Avenida Belgrano 1055 in Rosario.

When it began regular transmissions on 18 November 1964, it was the first locally operated television station in Rosario and, in the account given by the Media Ownership Monitor, the first channel in the city to produce local content. Before it arrived, viewers in Rosario could watch only the programmes of Canal 7 from Buenos Aires, relayed locally on channel 8. Canal 5 gave the river-port city a television voice of its own, and it has kept a local news presence ever since, even as most of its schedule came to be supplied by the national network.

Licence and launch in 1964

The station's legal beginning dates to 23 April 1964, when, by Decree 2938, the national executive awarded Rader S.A. de Radiodifusión a licence for the channel 5 frequency in Rosario. Rader was still in formation and, per the award record, comprised 154 people. Research held by the Universidad Nacional de Rosario describes it as RADER, Radiodifusora de Rosario, presided over from 1964 to 1968 by Rolando Lo Celso, listed as the station's founder on Rader's behalf. Regular transmissions began on 18 November 1964.

The launch was staged as a civic event. Later accounts describe the first official transmission coming from the Estación Fluvial, Rosario's river station on the Paraná, with a large inaugural show featuring national artists alongside performers from Rosario itself. A contemporary magazine account called it the first of the two channels awarded to Rosario and the first to go on air on the Argentine littoral. The technical beginnings were modest: a small transmitter of just 200 watts, so live, locally made programmes carried much of the early schedule, supplemented by programmes from Buenos Aires.

Early programming and local identity

News was there from the start. Its first newscast was Noticinco, and live information remained the core of its own production, a pattern the Media Ownership Monitor notes was typical of interior channels, which retransmitted programmes from Buenos Aires channels 9, 11 and 2 while making most of their own output live. Other early programmes include Demos una Mano and Tertulia Hogareña, and children's shows such as Capitán Kapote and Esperando a Papá, both produced in the 1970s, alongside imported cartoons and American series such as Bonanza, Combat! and The Fugitive.

The station also showed ambition as a producer. A study held by the Universidad Nacional de Rosario records that in 1972 Canal 5 pioneered supplying other Argentine channels with a locally produced programme, Querer al país, an achievement previously managed only by Buenos Aires channels. In the late 1970s, according to academic work on regional television, repeaters multiplied its reach towards the centre of Santa Fe province, the south of Córdoba, the east of Entre Ríos and the north of Buenos Aires.

Pedro Simoncini and the educational and cultural turn

The figure most closely associated with Canal 5 is Pedro Simoncini, the Italian-born pioneer also central to the later creation of Telefe. The Media Ownership Monitor lists Simoncini and Ángel Cesaretti Monti as the founding interests behind the station, with Cesaretti Monti concentrating on managing Canal 5 and Rosario radio station LT8, while Simoncini held interests in channels across the country. The Universidad Nacional de Rosario dates Simoncini's presidency of Canal 5 to 1974, and VideoAge International records that by 1975 he was its president as well as majority shareholder of Canal 11 in Buenos Aires, and that from 1974 to 1980 he presided over the Argentine broadcasters' association, representing Canal 5.

The university account credits Simoncini with bringing a varied selection of educational and cultural content to local television, an emphasis that fits his wider career: his initial ambition, as VideoAge put it, was to produce and distribute educational programmes, an interest he returned to in the 1990s with TV Quality and Educable. Colour broadcasting arrived in 1980, and on 12 November 1982, by Decree 1207, the national executive renewed the station's licence.

Becoming a founding part of Telefe

The decisive change came with the privatisation of Buenos Aires channels 11 and 13, ordered by President Carlos Menem on 21 September 1989. One participant was Televisión Federal S.A., Telefe, whose principal shareholders included Televisoras Provinciales S.A., the provincial grouping of which Rader, Canal 5's licensee, was itself a shareholder. The Canal 11 licence went to Televisión Federal, effective 15 January 1990. LT 84 thus became a founding member of Telefe.

Simoncini explained that in 1989 he grouped Canal 5 and his other stations with Canal 11 in Buenos Aires to form Televisión Federal, Telefe, a name denoting federal television covering much of the country. The Media Ownership Monitor likewise notes that, like Canal 8 in Córdoba, Canal 5 was part of the group that acquired Canal 11 in 1989, joining a network of nine channels. Membership brought higher-quality local programmes, while locking channel 5 into a national schedule led from Buenos Aires.

Ownership changes, from Telefónica to Viacom and back to Rosario

Through the 1990s the corporate structure above the station changed repeatedly. In April 1998 it was announced that Televisoras Provinciales had sold its stake in Televisión Federal to Atlántida Comunicaciones, and that seven of the ten companies in the grouping, Rader among them, had accepted the offer for their respective licences, a transaction completed in September of that year that brought Canal 5 formally into the Grupo Telefe. Rader was absorbed in 1999 by Compañía de Televisión del Atlántico S.A., itself absorbed by Televisión Federal in 2004. In November 1999 Grupo Telefónica announced it would buy all of Telefe, including seven interior channels among them Canal 5; the purchase was approved in April 2000 and completed that May.

On 3 November 2016 Viacom agreed to buy Telefe and its channels, including channel 5, completing the purchase on 15 November; ENACOM approved the transfer on 30 March 2017. In 2019 CBS and Viacom merged to form ViacomCBS, later Paramount Global. On 23 October 2025, Grupo Televisión Litoral, the Rosario-based group led by Gustavo Scaglione and associated with José Luis Manzano, acquired Telefe from Paramount, returning the network to Argentine ownership — a Rosario station now owned by a Rosario-based group, within the network that group controls nationally.

Storm damage, digital transition and high definition

In 2007 a storm destroyed the channel's antenna, as it did Canal 3's, leaving the city without free-to-air television. Channel 5 was back the next day with a poor signal, and within twenty days was operating at 50 per cent of authorised power. In 2009 channels 3 and 5 inaugurated a new antenna improving on the pre-storm coverage, and from 2010 TV Pública has used it for its Rosario repeater.

Digital television came in stages. In February 1999 Canal 5 was authorised for ATSC digital test transmissions on channel 10. After Argentina adopted ISDB-T, it was authorised in August 2011 to test on UHF channel 38, and by November 2012 its signal was available on the national digital platform. On 28 July 2014 it began transmitting all its programming in high definition, becoming, by its record, the first Grupo Telefe channel in the interior to transmit in HD. In March 2015 it was assigned channel 33.1 for regular HD digital broadcasting, in 1080i, downscaled to 16:9 standard definition for its SD feed.

The 2018 rebrand as Telefe Rosario

For fifty-four years the station was known by its frequency. That ended in November 2018, when Grupo Telefe's interior channels replaced their frequency-based identification with the Telefe name, ahead of the analogue switch-off. Announced on 14 November and effective on 21 November, Canal 5 adopted the name Telefe Rosario, following the pattern of Telefe Córdoba and Telefe Santa Fe, though Canal 5 Rosario remains in local usage. Since 29 April 2021 it has also been available on DirecTV channel 137.

Programming today

Today, part of the station's programming consists of retransmitting the content of Canal 11 in Buenos Aires, the flagship of the Telefe network, as is the case for Telefe's interior stations generally. That network feed supplies the bulk of the schedule, in Spanish, carried in Rosario on channel 5. What distinguishes Telefe Rosario from a simple relay is the local programming it inserts into that schedule.

Local titles include Telefe Noticias, its news service; Aislados, an interview cycle noted as the first programme from the interior to be carried on Telefe Internacional; Buen Telefe, its morning newscast; El Show de AJ, an entertainment programme; and Sabores de Campo, a cooking programme also shown on Telefe Internacional. Local programmes reaching the international channel show the station still originates content with a life beyond its coverage area, much as Querer al país did in 1972.

Telefe Noticias and the local news service

News is the centre of Telefe Rosario's local identity, as it has been since Noticinco in the 1960s. Its news service is Telefe Noticias, the local version for Greater Rosario of the network's news brand of the same name. The service currently has two editions from Monday to Friday, a midday edition and a main evening edition at 20:00. On 16 December 2019 the first edition adopted the name El noticiero de la gente, taking the same name as the network's midday newscast in Buenos Aires. The Media Ownership Monitor characterised the station as combining a schedule mostly retransmitted from Telefe Buenos Aires with strong local production concentrated in its newscasts.

Buen Telefe, the morning newscast, is broadcast jointly with Telefe Santa Fe, in the provincial capital less than 200 kilometres away. The station record dates Buen Telefe in that duplex form to 2024, replacing the previous morning programme Buen día Rosario. The link is long-standing: the Media Ownership Monitor noted Telefe Rosario shared much of its management team with channel 13 in Santa Fe.

Coverage, repeaters and place in Rosario

The station's transmission area covers Greater Rosario and surrounding areas, extending into the north of Buenos Aires province. Historically it maintained repeaters in the south of Santa Fe province, at El Trébol, Rufino and Venado Tuerto, and one in the north of Buenos Aires province at Pergamino, although the station's record notes that these repeaters are currently out of service. Its signal today reaches viewers free to air, through digital terrestrial television, and through cable and satellite carriage, including its DirecTV slot.

Within Rosario, Telefe Rosario is one of two long-established private free-to-air stations, alongside Canal 3, which went on air in June 1965, seven months after Canal 5, and is owned by the same Televisión Litoral group. Together they have defined commercial television in Rosario for six decades. For media researchers, Canal 5 serves as a case study of regional television and identity: the city's first local station, with a schedule increasingly supplied from the capital, set against a newsroom and local programmes that keep it rooted in its own city on the Paraná.