[15] Indeed, Baton had already begun quietly contacting the successful applicants in other cities to gauge their interest in forming a cooperative group to share Canadian programming among the stations.

[16] However, the ITO faced opposition from Spence Caldwell, a former CBC executive and one of the unsuccessful applicants for the Toronto licence, who had first approached the BBG in April 1960 to pitch a second-station network proposal of his own.

[17] That fall, the Caldwell group (now named the Canadian Television Network, or CTN) and the ITO faced off in a series of meetings with the BBG.

The ITO decided not to follow through with a formal network application, but the stations – particularly Baton, which said it had no interest in participating in CTN and believed it could still be successful without one – continued to indicate various concerns with the viability of Caldwell's proposal.

[3] Baton's opposition to the CTN reversed in early 1961, soon after CFTO won the broadcast rights to the Canadian Football League Eastern Conference for the 1961 and 1962 seasons.

[19] Although the plan was neither officially rejected or approved, various uncertainties eventually led John Bassett to decide to sign an affiliation agreement with CTN instead to ensure the games would air.

[23][24][nb 1] The CBC had objected to the network's initial name, apparently claiming it had exclusive rights to the term "Canadian", and therefore the letters "CTV" have no official expanded meaning.

The Caldwell-led management team immediately ran into financial trouble, and relations between the network and its stations were not smooth at first since CTV had essentially been the product of a forced marriage.

Its attempt to expand to the United States ended when Buffalo's three network affiliates threatened legal action, forcing WNYP off the air.

Having already bought CFQC-TV in Saskatoon in 1971,[36] Baton purchased additional stations in Saskatchewan – including CTV affiliates CKCK-TV Regina, CICC-TV Yorkton, and CIPA-TV Prince Albert – in 1986.

Baton then purchased CJOH in 1988, followed by the MCTV and Huron Broadcasting stations, which included four CTV affiliates in Northern Ontario, in 1990.

[38] CHUM Limited, owner of the CTV-affiliated ATV system serving the Maritimes, already owned independent station CITY-TV in Toronto, and by this point had begun launching national cable channels like MuchMusic.

[40] After several years of contentious negotiations between the eight remaining owner-affiliates, by late 1992 they had reached an agreement to recapitalize the network, and provide a path for a single company to eventually take control.

The company changed its name to CTV Inc. in 1998, and eventually acquired two of the final three large-market stations, CKY and CFCF (it replaced the third, CHAN, as discussed below).

In the late 1990s, cuts were made to the news staff and productions at CTV's two small-market Saskatchewan stations, CICC-TV in Yorkton and CIPA-TV in Prince Albert.

Similarly, the four Maritime stations, known collectively as CTV Atlantic (then known as ATV), and the four Northern Ontario stations, known collectively as CTV Northern Ontario (then known as MCTV), each had their local news production cut back in the early 2000s to one single centrally produced newscast for each region, with only brief inserts for news of strictly local interest.

This was a controversial move in all of the affected communities, especially in Northern Ontario where MCTV's newscasts were the only locally oriented news programs in those markets.

In 2000, typical of the ownership consolidation trend at the time, BCE Inc. acquired CTV, Netstar Communications, and The Globe and Mail newspaper, combining them into a media division known as Bell Globemedia (BGM).

[46][47] CTV lost significant coverage in British Columbia and Newfoundland and Labrador at the beginning of the 21st century, starting with a major television realignment in Vancouver.

In 2000, Canwest Global bought the television stations of Western International Communications, which owned long-standing CTV affiliates CHAN in Vancouver and CHEK-TV in Victoria.

Unlike CHAN, CIVT has only one transmitter covering the metropolitan areas of Vancouver and Victoria, and has to rely on cable and satellite to reach the rest of the province.

CIVT is either carried on a higher channel number or unavailable altogether in the Mountain Time Zone portion of British Columbia, where CTV relies on CFCN-DT or CFRN-DT as its main carriers.

[54] On May 20, 2015, Corus Entertainment announced an agreement with Bell Media to switch its three CBC affiliates in Ontario to CTV: CHEX-DT Peterborough, CHEX-TV-2 Oshawa, and CKWS-DT Kingston.

[56][57] The network's programming consists mainly of hit American series (such as The Amazing Race, The Big Bang Theory, Blue Bloods, Castle, CSI, The Good Doctor, Grey's Anatomy, The Mentalist, The Michael J.

CTV has purchased Canadian broadcast rights to a number of American cable series, such as The Sopranos, Nip/Tuck, Punk'd, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and The Osbournes.

In many cases, CTV has been one of the few conventional broadcast networks in the world to air these series in prime time, which has attracted some controversy from Canadian media watchdogs and parents groups who object to the profanity, violence and sexual content of Nip/Tuck, The Sopranos and The Osbournes—which, unlike originating broadcaster MTV, CTV aired uncensored.

On July 2, 2005, CTV broadcast 20 hours of the Live 8 concerts, which was watched by over 10.5 million people – nearly one-third the country's population – at some point during the day; however, the average audience was much lower.

CTV-owned CIVT-DT in Vancouver followed, becoming the second station in the CTV network to broadcast its local newscasts in high definition as of November 23, 2009.

[citation needed] Bell officially announced on May 30, 2011, that the A-Channel television network would be rebranded as "CTV Two", a change that took effect on August 29, 2011.

In 1966, colour programming was ushered in with a new logo, depicting a red circle containing the initial "C", a blue square with a "T", and a green inverted triangle with a "V".