It’s not owned by a big media corporation, it’s not profit-driven and it’s not exactly a specialty channel, but the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network is launching Sept. 1 as the only national aboriginal television service in Canada.

In February, the crtc granted Television Northern Canada – a regional aboriginal channel that’s been broadcasting to the Yukon, Northwest Territories, Arctic, Quebec and parts of Labrador since the early 1990s – a licence to operate a nonprofit national service, aptn.

As a result, tvnc will cease to exist on Aug. 31, to be replaced by aptn the next day.

‘We’ll be offering a full range of programming, including arts, documentaries, public affairs, newscasts, children’s, variety and some sports,’ says Patrick Tourigney, the network’s director of regulatory affairs. ‘That is how we’re different from a specialty. We’re not a niche service, even though all programming will have aboriginal themes.’

With a programming budget of roughly $7.5 million, including development, the new network, based in Winnipeg and Ottawa, will start out broadcasting only shelf product, much of which will be from tvnc, CBC North and the National Film Board.

‘We won’t be doing any live programming until January, at which time we will start our own daily newscast and a daily phone-in show,’ says Tourigney, who left his post as manager of English-language pay and specialty services at the crtc to launch the new network.

The only in-house programming aptn plans to produce is news and public affairs.

Meantime, the network has purchased two daily CBC North newscasts that are currently only available to the northern Canadian region: North Beat, a half-hour, late-night news show, and Igalaaq, a half-hour, supper-time news show broadcast in both English and aboriginal languages.

It has also acquired a load of nfb docs, produced by aboriginal people, for a weekly, one-hour program entitled NFB Showcase.

Spirit Bay, a cbc drama featuring a young Graham Greene, has been licensed, as has Tales from the Long House, a live-action/animation children’s series coproduced by Toronto’s Catalyst Entertainment and Tele Images in France.

Twenty-six weeks of French doc/public-affairs programming and 26 weeks of aboriginal programming have been acquired from Taqramiut Productions in Northern Quebec.

Roughly 30% of programming is from members who were contributing to tvnc, like the Northern Native Broadcasting Corporation (Yukon) and the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation (Nunavut)

The network, which is on a six-hour wheel repeated twice daily for an 18-hour day, will broadcast roughly 120 hours of programming a week. As part of its licence mandate, there will be 72 hours of English-language, 30 hours of aboriginal-language (of which there are 30 in Canada) and 13 hours of French-language programming.

And although it will program a minimum 90% Cancon to fulfill its licence requirements, it will be acquiring content from the u.s., South America, Australia and New Zealand.

‘We’re not part of a large corporate group, like chum or ctv who can just add another specialty because they have all the built-in efficiencies. We’re really a very small operation and it’s going to be a challenge for us. It’s probably going to take more than a year for the network to really reflect its soul the way it wants to,’ says Tourigney.

aptv has mandatory carriage on all class 1 and class 2 cable systems and has a subscriber fee of 15 cents a month on the basic cable package.

Its motto: ‘Seeing Canada and the world through aboriginal eyes.’