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CKOI-FM
City of license	Montreal, Quebec
Broadcast area	Greater Montreal area
Branding	"96,9 CKOI"
Slogan	"Le puissance musicale de Montreal"
Frequency	96.9 MHz (FM)
First air date	(Disputed; see history)
Format	hot adult contemporary (DJs and presentation/content are in French, but plays both Francophone and Anglophone music)
ERP	307,000 watts
Class	C1
Transmitter coordinates	45°29′53.88″N 73°34′14.16″W / 45.4983°N 73.5706°W / 45.4983; -73.5706
Callsign meaning	CKOI is an homonym of "C'est quoi?", meaning "What is it?".
Owner	Corus Entertainment
Website	CKOI 96,9 FM

CKOI-FM is a French-language Canadian radio station located in Montreal, Quebec.

Owned and operated by Corus Entertainment, it broadcasts on 96.9 MHz from the roof of the CIBC Tower in Downtown Montreal with an effective radiated power of 307,000 watts (class C1) using an omnidirectional antenna. It is one of the few Montreal FM stations to not use the standard Mount Royal tower, and it is one of North America's most powerful FM stations.

The station has a hot adult contemporary format because of 1970s and 1980s music in the playlist. For many years CKOI-FM was the most popular station in Montreal according to BBM Canada ratings using full coverage reach numbers (as opposed to central reach numbers which only take into account listeners from the central market area); however, full coverage reach numbers are no longer available for Montreal radio stations as BBM now relies on the Portable People Meter (PPM) technology to measure ratings in Montreal.

More recently, the station's branding has been extended to sister stations CKOY-FM in Sherbrooke and CFEL-FM in Quebec City.

History

CKVL-FM, as the station was originally known, was founded by Jack Tietolman and Corey Thomson and probably went on the air at some point between 1947 and 1957. Sources disagree on the date, and at least seven different years (including three post-1957 ones) are known to have been reported as the station's first air date. ^[1] The confusion is increased by the fact that there is no known report suggesting that the station went silent for any noticeable period of time after getting on the air, despite this phenomenon being relatively common among 1950s FM stations. In any case, the Canadian Communication Foundation, which claims the station's first air date was in 1947, does report that CKVL-FM was confirmed as being on the air in 1957.

The station was originally a full-time repeater of AM sister station CKVL (now CINF). As such, the station was bilingual (French/English), with the majority of programming being in French.

By 1962, CKVL-FM increased its power from 10,000 watts to 307,000 watts omnidirectional from the rooftop of the CIBC Tower in Downtown Montreal. It is often believed that this high power was the result of a clerical error by the CRTC, but that organization did not exist at the time as radio was still regulated by the CRTC's predecessor, the Board of Broadcast Governors, and regulations limiting effective radiated power to 100,000 watts on FM, which came into force that same year, do not apply to stations which had already got approval for a higher power.

The simulcast of CKVL ended in 1970, as CKVL-FM launched an automated oldies format.

On December 6, 1976, CKVL-FM became CKOI-FM, and the station's format was changed to progressive rock. It evolved into a largely New Wave based format in 1979 and adopted a rock-leaning contemporary hit radio format in 1980.

The Fall 1991 Bureau of Broadcast Measurement ratings were a defining moment for the station, as it found itself in first place with over a million listeners in full coverage. It was the first time ever in Montreal that any FM station obtained the first place in the Fall ratings, which are by far the most important for the radio industry as they are used to determine prices charged for publicity. CKOI-FM would get over a million listeners in 32 consecutive books (excluding Summer ratings starting in 2001 which were only done for the central area of the market), from Fall 1991 to Fall 2002 inclusively. (The station had already managed to get a million listeners on a few occasions during Summer ratings before 1991.) The station's best-ever results under the old diary system were obtained in the Spring 1995 ratings, in which CKOI-FM got 1,341,300 listeners; by comparison, CKAC, which was the station's closest competitor, got only 775,500 listeners.

CKOI-FM, along with sister station CKVL, was sold in 1992 by its founder Jack Tietolman to Metromedia CMR, a company owned by Pierre Arcand and Pierre Béland. Both stations would be sold again in 2001, this time to Corus Entertainment.

On January 1, 2002, the station's city of licence became Montreal (it had always officially been Verdun until then), as a result of forced municipal mergers which made Verdun a Montreal borough.

Unlike other North American superpower FM stations which have lowered their power since the 1990s, CKOI-FM does cherishes its signal; as a result, when Industry Canada advised the station in 2004 that it was not compliant with updated Code 6 safety regulations (which deal with acceptable levels of radiation), owner Corus Entertainment invested to make the transmitter compliant, instead of taking the "easy way" out, which would have been in this specific case to reduce power to "only" 122,800 watts.

The station's studios were moved for the first time ever in July 2006, after decades at 211 Gordon Avenue in Verdun; the new studios are located at Place Bonaventure. After this, the station pretty much shifted to a hot adult contemporary format, even though still listed by Mediabase & BDS as a top 40 station. When the station moved to hot AC, it began beating rival CKMF-FM (NRJ) again.

Everyday, they would have this Top du top DJ mix show mixing 4 English songs at 10am, 11am, 1pm & 2pm, mixing mostly newer hits, recurrent hits and gold hits. In addition, another DJ mix show with English songs exists as 2 plus 1, where it airs at 10:30am, 1:30pm & 2:30pm. The show consists of it DJ mixes, starting with a recurrent or 2000s gold hit (or a pre-1999 song), followed by a 1960s-1990s song after this and ending with a newer song. Other shows are Le super 16, which airs weekdays at 9am, mixing 16 English-language songs, old or new in general. Another mixshow is 3 à 3 at 3pm, airing 3 hits, also old or new in general.

Personalities

In recent years, the station has been known especially for pranks by the Masked Avengers, a duo composed of Marc-Antoine Audette and Sebastien Trudel, against internationally-known personalities such as Jacques Chirac, Britney Spears, Sarah Palin and George W. Bush. The duo appeared on the program's afternoon show Les Cerveaux de l'info, along with co-host Richard Z. Sirois.

Comedian Pierre Brassard, also known for prank phone calls, was also previously associated with the station.

CKOI-FM lost its longtime morningman Normand Brathwaite on March 17, 2006, following a conflict with former co-host Jean-René Dufort; the latter became the station's morning man until June 22, 2007.^[2]

Notes

External links

• CKOI 96,9 FM
• CKOI history at Canadian Communications Foundation
• Query the REC's Canadian station database for CKOI-FM