Don't Change that Channel ... Change the Rules!

We live in the age of television proliferation. Gone are the comfortable days of the Big Three. Today whole new networks are coming to life, taking advantage of converging technologies, orbiting satellites and pizza-sized discs, the exploding Web and improving cable. New brands are struggling to be born from the marriages of new media. And the stakes are growing as long-term corporate futures are wagered on short-term business model bets.

But is more better? It's hard to escape the feeling that, instead of having 57 channels and nothing on, today it's 500 channels ... and still nothing on. You can change the channel. But can you change television?

In Toronto, televisionary Moses Znaimer, co-founder, president, and executive producer of Citytv, has seen the problem and has the answer. "The problem is not too much television," says Znaimer, 55, a Zen-like figure in a black suit with a white shirt, hair slicked back in a small ponytail. "It's too much of the same television." Twenty-four years ago, Znaimer and a partner started Citytv with $1.5 million, 80 employees, and a distinct vision of how to make TV with a difference -- TV that was local and interactive, real-time with real people, optimistic and realistic, constantly reinvented and grounded in a consistent set of values. Today Citytv has grown to more than 600 employees, revenues of more than $200 million, and ratings that consistently give it a large % of the Toronto market.

Now Znaimer is out to spread his vision: he recently launched MuchaMusica, a Spanish language pop music venture in Argentina, privatized Alberta, Canada's public access television service, took over creative supervision of CKVR Barrie, a 40-year old Canadian Broadcasting Corporation affiliate, and bid for a license to open a Citytv-like station in Vancouver, Canada -- perhaps the first step in a strategy to create mini-citytv's across North America.

What amazes Znaimer, even after 24 years of pioneering creativity, is how little creativity the rest of the television industry seems capable of. "How is it possible," he asks, "that French TV is like German TV which shares a lot of similarities with English TV? The answer is the similar way in which TV is made. There are arguably 1,000 TV stations in the world, and they're all virtually identical in the way programs are created in offices and executed in artificial places called studios."

Znaimer's creation: a studio-less television studio, program-less television programming, a boundary-less television experience that embraces reality, rather than make-believe, as the essence of the medium. Starting in September 1972, when Citytv first took to the airwaves, it was clear that this was television with a difference: low-powered, low-cost, and local television delivered with high-energy, high-style, and high-tech. Over the past 24 years, Znaimer's principles have remained consistent -- so much so that the principles are the programs and the programs are always on. Here are the listings behind Citytv's TV revolution.

Program One: How you do TV is the TV you do.

"The first task," says Znaimer, "is to escape the studio." If Marshall McLuhan's dictum was, the medium is the message, Moses Znaimer's corollary is, the process is the product.

To make it happen, Citytv moved into a classic five story, 160,000 square foot building on the busiest block of Queen Street West in the heart of downtown Toronto between a stretch of sidewalk cafes and ethnic restaurants. Then Znaimer rebuilt into a studio-less television studio, with no phony sets or fake scenery. Instead, the building is equipped with 35 "hydrants," outlets that connect audio, video, sync, intercom, and lights with 160 miles of cable. Any corner of the building can be on-air within minutes. Anything can happen, anywhere, anytime, and find itself part of the broadcast.

"What we do, every one of us, constitutes the performance," explains Znaimer. "You don't have to choreograph it, because it's constantly there. Except in television, you never see it. You only see the static, artificial final product." Citytv's first principle: television is flow, not show.

Program Two: Where you do TV is how you do TV.

"If you want to start a new TV operation in Poland," says Znaimer, "the usual impulse is to go to the people who're making TV in Poland. It's in a compound 15 miles out of town. There's more than just one guard, and it's a state secret."

It's not all that different from TV stations in North America -- most of which are located in anonymous suburban office buildings or behind guarded fences.

Citytv is local TV. As such, it's part of the city's life, not something separate from it. The downtown location is a programming decision, as is the internal layout of the building, which is organized around a motif of "streets," intentionally blurring the distinction between the outside and inside worlds.

MuchMusic -- where performers such as Hootie and the Blowfish got their first big break -- erases the boundary even more. Its ground-floor, full-scale windows open up like a store front, inviting the street culture in and transforming televised musical performances into free sidewalk concerts for the community. It's part of the way the building works to support the kind of TV Znaimer wants to do: the building shoots itself.