TVO is Ontario's public educational media organization and a trusted source of interactive educational content that informs, inspires, and stimulates curiosity and thought. TVO's vision is to empower people to be engaged citizens of Ontario through educational media.
TVO uses its media resources to support the following priorities of the Ontario Ministry of Education:
- Contribute to school readiness and help kids to be successful learners;
- Increase the involvement of parents in their children's education;
- Encourage active citizenship and public engagement.
Lisa de Wilde,
Chief Executive Officer, TVO
"TVO plays a valuable role as a smart alternative to commercial broadcasters; we are helping people of all ages become more engaged in our communities, our province, and our world."
I'd like to welcome you to TVO with a question:
What makes you think?
For many of us, the answer might be: "Bold ideas, and new perspectives on our world".
Some may say "new thinking on how I can help my child succeed in school, and in life."
Others may put it this way: "A smart, passionate debate around issues that impact us all."
In a province as diverse and dynamic as Ontario, TVO plays a valuable role as a smart alternative to commercial broadcasters. With our unique educational mandate, and our commitment to bring today's most important issues into focus, we are helping people of all ages become more engaged in our communities, our province, and our world.
Over the last two years, TVO has made a strategic shift, from pure TV station to multi-platform educational media organization. We're making our content more accessible, and we're heading in new directions to better inspire and inform Ontarians. I invite you to explore our web sites tvo.org, TVOKids.com and TVOParents.com, and discover how TVO is creating more impact, with more people, in more ways.
And after you've done that, please let me know what you found especially thought-provoking, or what we could do to make TVO an even more effective means of citizen engagement in Ontario. My email address is lisa@tvo.org.
Lisa de Wilde
TVO is a publicly-funded, educational media organization available to Ontario residents both off-air and on cable.
TVO content is accessible through the main broadcast network TVO, and our interactive and distinctive online communities: TVOKids.com, TVOParents.com, and tvo.org.
TVO reports to the Ontario legislature through the Minister of Education, in accordance with the Ontario Educational Communications Authority Act.
TVO's broadcast licence is granted by the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission. Our current licence is set for renewal in September 2008.
TVO is governed by a volunteer Board of Directors, and supported by a network of Regional Councillors from across the province.
TVO administers the Independent Learning Centre (ILC), the province's designated provider of distance education, enabling thousands of students annually to earn credits toward a diploma, upgrade their skills, and achieve their academic and career goals at a pace, time, and place of their choosing.
TVO first went on-air in 1970.
TVO is available and accessible to virtually all homes in the province. Ninety per cent of the Ontario market accesses TVO through multi-channel services (e.g. cable, satellite & digital) and 10% of the households capture the TVO signal over-the-air. Our broadcast distribution includes 24 major transmitter sites and 156 low-power rebroadcast transmitter locations throughout Ontario.
85% of the people of Ontario (over 10 million people aged 2+) tuned in to TVO programming in the last broadcast season.
TVO reaches on average 3.5 million Ontarians each week.
60% of TVO's schedule is made up of Canadian content. About 80% of our programming budget is devoted to Canadian content, and of that more than 80% goes to content produced in our studios at 2180 Yonge Street -- a testament to our uniqueness in the Canadian marketplace.
TVO's distinctive schedule of current affairs, documentary, drama and film continues to maintain an average 2% share in Ontario in prime-time, higher than all Canadian specialty channels except TSN.
More than 70% of TVO's 6 am to midnight broadcast day is devoted to uninterrupted children's educational content.
TVO's children's educational programming reached nearly every Ontario child: 1.4 million kids aged 2-11, or 97.3% of the kids in that age range in the last broadcast season. On average, TVO reaches over 500,000 Ontario children aged 2-11 on a weekly basis.
TVO's web destinations tvo.org, TVOKids.com and TVOParents.com were reached by 3.7 million unique visitors in the last broadcast season.
Each month there are about 4.5 million page views and almost 300,000 unique visitors to TVOKids.com.
Podcast downloads of TVO's current affairs programs (The Agenda with Steve Paikin, Allan Gregg in Conversation, and Big Ideas) totalled 2.6 million in the last broadcast season.
In August, TVO's Big Ideas podcasts were the #1 download in the Higher Education category of Apple's iTunes in Belgium, Canada, and the United States.
TVO receives an annual operating grant of $37.5M from the Ministry of Education.
The number of people employed by TVO is approximately 365.
TVO employees are represented by two in-house unions: the CMG (Canadian Media Guild), which represents production staff, and the CEP (Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada), which represents technical operations employees and some administration staff.
The Agenda with Steve Paikin
