CTV Montreal’s new virtual set.
Starting Monday, CTV News Montreal looks a lot more flashy … and a little more fake.
The station, which has been operating out of the Bell campus on Nuns’ Island since a water main break flooded its studio in August 2024, launched a new virtual set, in which the anchor sits at a desk in a green room and the background is digitally added during the broadcast.
It’s a first for CTV, though Global Montreal has been doing the same since 2008, and plenty of TV stations with big and small budgets have embraced the green-screen virtual set model.
The advantage is flexibility — you can create new sets, change them on the fly, incorporate dynamic elements. The limit is your imagination and digital artist budget.
The disadvantage, besides the feeling that you’re presenting something fake to viewers, is that despite the advances in the technology, it still doesn’t look 100% polished. You can still see edges that are a bit too sharp, things in perfect focus when they should be slightly beyond the depth of field, unnatural brightness and contrast.
But for CTV Montreal, it’s an understandable move. Things were extremely chaotic in those first days after the move, with cables lining the floors of makeshift studios, shared between CTV and RDS, where one team would have to keep quiet if the other was on the air. Probably the biggest benefit of this new set isn’t so much the green screen, but just being in their own room. (Except it’s not really their own room, the studio is shared with Noovo’s nightly debate show Les Débatteurs.)
For comparison, here’s what it looked like before the flood, before the launch of the new set, and now:
Caroline Van Vlaardingen hosts the last CTV Montreal newscast before the flood in August 2024.
Mutsumi Takahashi hosts a newscast in the temporary studio.
Caroline Van Vlaardingen in the new virtual set on Monday.
But what about the old studio? Are they ever going to move back to Papineau and René-Lévesque?
I asked Bell Media about future plans and whether the move to Nuns’ Island is becoming permanent. The response: “We have no news to share at this time.”
They should work on the quality of the news they present. Virtual sets are meaning less.
Look at what podcasters can do with a camera phone. The content is more important then the set.
Unfortunately, people in the TV business simply do and want things to appear a certain way out of habit.
Lets make our fake set look like a real set. Just like lets make our fake news appear as real news.
Forgot to say let’s make our left-wing fake news look and sound like right-wing real news.
News set? What news?
Disease of the day? A new medical condition to raise your fear factor? Politicians who reach into their grab bag of boilerplate blather and seemingly never held to account? Do reporters even hold scrums anymore?
It is in the end another way to save money. You don’t have to rebuild a set or whatever, you just do some new digital decorations and call it a day. It is an amazing tool for the Bell death star to be able to change the look of the station overnight to cover up the next round of firings.
This reminds me of the time when the CJOH building near Baseline road in Ottawa had caught fire in 2010. CJOH CTV moved to the Byward Market building with A Channel and CFRA. They thought that they will be at the Byward Market location temporarily and months after, CJOH decided to permanently stay in the Market downtown. I believe it is because CTV does not own the former building near Baseline Road in Nepean. Could CFCF permanently stay at the Verdun area? Do you know if Bell and CTV own the Montreal Teleport on Papineau? OK to ask? Thanks
The new set is better but I’m still bummed out about the lack of a nightly sportscast and the banter between the different anchors (news, sports, weather). Mitsumi is so sombre all the time, which doesn’t help. Wonder why they don’t get the TSN 690 guys to do an in studio segment every night? Please no video calls via zoom.
One other thing, it seems like the local news is limited to about 5 segments. The rest of the time it’s filled with local news from other places.
CTV Atlantic in Halifax is also using a virtual set, so the Montreal station isn’t the only one doing it
CFCF-12 used to be so unique prior to Bell’s purchase of the station, it was iconic of Montreal and something to be proud of. Bit by bit Bell stripped it away, until it was just an empty husk of what it once was.
In the end, the only remaining spark of identity was its local newscast, but now even that has faded away. This change to a VR studio is the final nail in the coffin for me, you cannot get any more generic and basic than this (at least before you could SEE Montreal streets in the background windows, or the anchors in a physical studio on Papineau avenue!). So what is left? Just *5* legacy anchors and reporters dating back to the 80’s and 90’s, when it was still known as Pulse News.
As we enter into 2026, it will be Mutsumi’s 40th anniversary. I suspect Bell is eager to retire her, even though she’s the face of local news in Montreal. I’ve noticed her losing her voice often, that doesn’t help. It’s likely Caroline Van Vlaardingen, Stephane Giroux and Rob Lurie’s days are numbered too. It would be unthinkable to remove any of them, but this is Bell, look at all the other long timers they laid off in recent years. They’d like nothing more than to save yet more money and strip away more local identity.
Is it that unusual that a workplace has fewer and fewer people who have been there 30+ years?