Cable Pioneer remembered as a True Friend of Canadian Multicultural Television
TORONTO, Dec. 8 /CNW/ - Shan Chandrasekar, president and CEO of Asian Television Network International Limited (ATN) today paid tribute to cable giant Ted Rogers as the father of Canadian multicultural television.
"Mr. Rogers was a visionary, a trail blazer and was one among the first entrepreneurs to understand the importance of Canadian multiculturalism," said Mr. Chandrasekar, who began his own broadcasting career programming a South Asian television show in Toronto on a Rogers' community cable channel in the early 1970s.
"Long before CFMT was launched, Ted Rogers was the first cable operator to offer community programming in numerous languages. He has been a pioneer and a role model," Mr. Chandrasekar said.
"Because of Mr. Ted Rogers' vision of consumer choice and diversity, multicultural communities in parts of Canada have a rich legacy of Canadian programming in their mother tongues," he added.
Today Rogers Cable in Toronto offers more than 60 third-language digital television networks broadcasting in 22 languages. These include channels in South Asian languages such as Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Bangla, and Gujarati, as well as Mandarin and Cantonese, Arabic, Italian, Greek, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Tagalog, Spanish, Vietnamese, Hebrew, German and Portuguese. ATN operates 14 South Asian television networks, all carried on Rogers Cable.
"Mr. Ted Rogers will be greatly missed. He felt deeply about fairness and diversity, and was always a gentleman in his business dealings," said Mr. Chandrasekar.