Rogers cable customers got a black screen when they tuned into the finale of Battle of the Blades Monday at 8 p.m. in Toronto and parts of Peterborough and London, Ont.

CBC was forced to rebroadcast the show, in which Jamie Salé and Craig Simpson were declared winners, on its local affiliate in Toronto at 9 p.m. The signal may also have been affected in Ottawa.

"As soon as we knew there was a problem, we put in an urgent request to Rogers trying to determine how quickly the signal would resume," said CBC spokesman Jeff Keay.

Rogers did not resume service until 8:48 p.m., right before the winners were crowned.

Keay said the CBC decided to rebroadcast when viewers in one of Canada's largest cities missed most of the show.

Rogers customers who phoned a customer support line were told that the cable firm was having "transmission difficulties" with several channels, including CBC.

Tash Barkey, external communications manager with Rogers, could not say exactly what went wrong with the Rogers signal.

"We had a technical issue with some of our encoding equipment last night with intermittent interruptions affecting CBLT [a CBC affiliate] in the GTA," she said in an email statement. "HD feeds and timeshifted feeds were not affected."