CFYK Radio - Yellowknife Local Broadcast Media

In 1974, the CBC provided the only live radio and television in Yellowknife. CFYK-1340 carried CBC AM network programming, as well as some local News and Music-based programs.

With the 1973 launch of the first Canadian Anik broadcast satellites, the CBC also broadcast live television to the community, rebroadcasting CBUT-2 from Vancouver. The local cable television company flew video tapes up from Edmonton, recorded by an Edmonton cable company, hand-picked mostly from the three U.S. commercial networks, as aired by the CBS, NBC and ABC stations in Spokane, Washington. These tapes were aired two days later, except hockey games, which were aired 24 hours later, if the tapes arrived in time.

12 hours of video tapes were recorded each day in Edmonton. The Yellowknife cable company aired them on a single channel, then repeated them once, 12 hours later.

With more details of the CBC's television broadcasting history in Yellowknife, and the North in general, the CBC once had a History page for CBC North. Here is it, courtesy of Archive.org, from March 21, 2005:

CBC Television first came North in 1967. But it was not TV like we know it today. Videotapes were shipped north, and played for only 4 hours a day. The Partridge Family became well-known in Yellowknife....perhaps too well-known.

Then in 1973 along came the first of Canada's Anik satellites, and that allowed the broadcasting of programs specifically designed for the North. But they were still produced in the South. Nothing changed much until the end of the decade, but when the change began, it was unstoppable.

First, in 1979 the North got its first TV program actually produced in the North. We called it "Our Ways".

Then in 1981, CBC North began to share its airspace with the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation, and later, with other northern Native Communications Societies.

By 1982 a new weekly current affairs program, Focus North, began. In its 12 years on the air, Focus North grew to be the North's most widely recognized television production, in large part, through its award-winning english-language documentaries.

Throughout the 1980s, the north's many aboriginal languages were heard more and more on CBC television. Taqravut was an Inuktitut-language program produced in Montreal and Ottawa from the late seventies until 1988. In that year, it was replaced by Aqsarniit, produced by an Inuktitut speaking unit based in Iqaluit, formerly known as Frobisher Bay.

In Northern Quebec, CBC North TV began a weekly program in the Cree language called Maamuitaau. The Dene peoples of the Western Arctic heard their own languages on CBC TV for the first time in 1984. This developed into the weekly Dene language program "Denendeh".

That same year, the series Northlands brought northern cultures and lifestyles to a southern audience for the first time.

Two years later, a television production unit was set up in Whitehorse. This enabled Focus North to include stories from northern BC, and Alaska as well as from the Yukon.

But these were all weekly programs. If they wanted daily news, Northerners had to turn to the South.....where they found that the news was not about the north. If they lived in the Eastern Arctic, Northerners got their daily news from the St. John's TV station; if they lived in the Western Arctic, they got their TV news from Vancouver.

So, in 1995, forty years after the first TV screen flickered to life in the North, CBC North TV went daily! Northern TV News, gathered in the North, produced in the North, about the North, became available every weekday to the 65 thousand people of the Northwest Territories and the 31 thousand people of the Yukon.

For the first time, Northerners from Iqaluit to Old Crow, from the High Arctic to the Alberta border, could turn on their TV sets and find out what happened in their lives that day...by tuning in to our new programs: