Television in Russia

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Television in Russia was introduced in 1931, when Russia was still known as the Russian SFSR.

History

Between 1941 and 1945 all television broadcasts in the nation were interrupted because of the Nazi Germany invasion of the Soviet Union. During this initial years, most of the television programs were about life in the Soviet Union, cultural activities and sports.

In 1960 a second national television channel is established. This initial expansion of activity encompassed mostly the city of Moscow, but to a lesser extent also Leningrad, the Urals, Siberia and the Ukrainian SSR. Each republic, area or region had its own television station.

In the 1970s and 1980s, television become the preeminent mass medium. In 1988 approximately 75 million households owned television sets, and an estimated 93 percent of the population watched television. Moscow, the base from which most of the television stations broadcast, transmitted some 90 percent of the country's programs, with the help of more than 350 stations and nearly 1,400 relay facilities.

Today there are about 15,000 transmitters in the country. Development of domestic digital TV transmitters, led within "Multichannel" research program, had already been finished. New domestic digital transmitters have been developed and installed in Nizhniy Novgorod and Saint Petersburg in 2001-2002.

Satellite television

The first Soviet communication satellite, called Molniya, was launched in 1965. By November, 1967 the national system of satellite television, called Orbita was deployed. The system consisted of 3 highly elliptical Molniya satellites, Moscow-based ground uplink facilities and about 20 downlink stations, located in cities and towns of remote regions of Siberia and Far East. Each station had a 12-meter receiving parabolic antenna and transmitters for re-broadcasting TV signal to local householders.

However, a large part of Soviet central regions were still not covered by transponders of Molniya satellites. By 1976 Soviet engineers developed a relatively simple and inexpensive system of satellite television (especially for Central and Northern Siberia). It included geostationary satellites called Ekran equipped with powerful 300 W UHF transponders, a broadcasting uplink station and various simple receiving stations located in various towns and villages of Siberian region. The typical receiving station, also called Ekran, represented itself as a home-use analog satellite receiver equipped with simple Yagi-Uda antenna. Later, Ekran satellites were replaced by more advanced Ekran-M series satellites.

In 1979 Soviet engineers developed Moskva (or Moscow) system of broadcasting and delivering of TV signal via satellites. New type of geostationary communication satellites, called Gorizont, were launched. They were equipped by powerful onboard transponders, so the size of receiving parabolic antennas of downlink stations was reduced to 4 and 2.5 meters (in comparison of early 12- meter dishes of standard orbital downlink stations).

By 1989 an improved version of Moskva system of satellite television has been called Moskva Global'naya (or Moscow Global). The system included a few geostationary Gorizont and Express type of communication satellites. TV signal from Moscow Global’s satellites could be received in any country of planet except Canada and North-West of the USA.

Modern Russian satellite broadcasting services based on powerful geostationary buses such as Gals (satellite), Express, Yamal and Eutelsat which provide a large quantity of free-to-air television channels to millions of householders. Pay-TV is growing in popularity amongst Russian TV viewers. The NTV Russia news company, owned by Gazprom, broadcasts the NTV Plus package to 560,000 households, reaching over 1.5 million viewers.^[1]

Digital broadcasting

Different alternatives were considered in the process of preparing proposals on shifting the country to digital broadcasting (thematic discussions began in the early 2000s), but the Ministry of IT and Communication decided to focus solely on terrestrial broadcasting as the object of digital TV implementation.

Two major bodies have been the major recipients of budget funds within the Federal Targeted Programme of Digital Broadcast Development:

• Ministry of IT and Communication
• the Federal State Unitary Enterprise ‘Russian TV and Radio Broadcasting Network.

The main obstacle for the introduction of digital TV is the need to replace the terrestrial transmitters and TV signal re-translators for the digital equipment.

List of channels

This is a list of television channels that broadcast in Russia.

State-owned

Private

• Petersburg - Channel 5
• REN TV
• STS TV
• Domashniy
• MTV Russia
• NTV Plus
• O₂TV
• Muz TV
• RBC TV
• 2×2 (TV channel)
• RTVi
• TV3 Russia
• DTV

Discontinued

• TV6
• TVS
• TeleExpo

See also

• Television in the Soviet Union
• Freedom of the press in Russia
• List of Russian language television channels

References