Television in Russia

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Television in Russia reaches more of the population than any other medium in the country, with nearly three quarters of Russians routinely tuning in to national channels. That figure tells only part of the story. Behind it lies a system built under wartime blackouts, rebuilt through the upheaval of Soviet reform, and then transformed again by one of the largest digital infrastructure projects ever attempted anywhere on Earth.

  How did a country that went dark on television during World War Two end up with more than 6,700 channels? How did Soviet engineers in the 1960s devise a satellite network that eventually could reach every corner of the planet except Canada and the northwest corner of the United States? And what did it take to bring a signal to every Russian home in an era of political upheaval and enormous geographic spread? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. The Soviet Foundation

  ›

  Between 1941 and 1945, television broadcasts across the Soviet Union went completely dark. Nazi Germany's invasion had made the peacetime experiment irrelevant. When the screens came back on, the programming that filled them reflected the priorities of the state: life in the Soviet Union, cultural activities, and sport.

  In 1956 a second national channel was established. Its reach was concentrated in Moscow but extended, to a lesser degree, into Leningrad, the Urals, Siberia, and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. From the start, each republic, region, and administrative area maintained its own station alongside the central feed.

  By the 1970s and 1980s, television had displaced every other medium as the primary way Soviet citizens consumed public life. By 1988 roughly 75 million households owned television sets, and an estimated 93 percent of the population watched. Moscow was the engine: it transmitted about 90 percent of all national programming, relying on more than 350 stations and nearly 1,400 relay facilities spread across an immense territory.

  Change, when it came, arrived through a formal political declaration. Gorbachev's new course, announced at the XXVII Congress, set in motion the loosening of censorship over broadcasting. At the time, the chairman of Radio and Television was Alexander Aksenov. By 1991 the Soviet-era Gosteleradio state system ran six national television channels, 52 stations across the former Soviet republics, and 78 regional stations inside the Russian Federation alone.

• 3. Orbiting the Signal

  ›

  The first Soviet communication satellite, called Molniya, went into orbit in 1965. By November 1967 the national satellite television system, called Orbita, was operational. It was built around three highly elliptical Molniya satellites, ground uplink facilities in Moscow, and about 20 downlink stations planted in remote cities and towns of Siberia and the Far East. Each downlink station had a 12-meter parabolic receiving antenna and its own transmitters to rebroadcast signals to local households.

  Molniya's orbital geometry left a gap: large portions of the Soviet central regions fell outside its transponder coverage. In 1976 Soviet engineers answered that gap with a simpler and cheaper system designed specifically for Central and Northern Siberia. It used geostationary satellites called Ekran, each equipped with powerful 300-watt UHF transponders. A typical Ekran receiving station used a standard home analog satellite receiver paired with a relatively simple Yagi-Uda antenna, a design that made local installation far less demanding than the 12-meter dishes of the earlier Orbita network. Later, the Ekran series gave way to the more advanced Ekran-M satellites.

  In 1979 engineers introduced the Moskva system, built around a new class of geostationary satellites called Gorizont. The Gorizont satellites carried powerful onboard transponders that allowed the size of receiving-station dishes to shrink dramatically, from the original 12-meter installations down to 4 and then 2.5 meters. By 1989 an expanded version, called Moskva Global'naya (or Moscow Global), was in service. Its Gorizont and Express-type satellites could deliver a television signal to any country on the planet except Canada and the northwest United States. That global reach pointed toward the pay-TV era that would follow the Soviet collapse.

• 4. Law and Ownership

  ›

  The Russian Constitution, adopted by national referendum on the 12th of December 1993, placed the right to seek, receive, transmit, produce and disseminate information among the universal rights guaranteed under Article 29. The same article set out the only conditions under which that right could be limited: by law, and only in the interests of protecting the Constitution, morality, health, lawful interests of other persons, or national defence.

  The specific statute governing broadcasting predated the Constitution by more than a year. The Law on Mass Media was passed on the 27th of December 1991 and took effect on the 13th of February 1992. It reinforced the freedom of information, prohibited censorship, and set out the rules for founding and owning media. Crucially, it permitted private broadcasting while placing limits on how much foreign individuals could control Russian outlets.

  The ownership map that emerged from these legal foundations is layered. Channel One Russia is held by a combination of the Russian government at 34.23 percent, VTB Bank at 32.89 percent, National Media Group at 19.46 percent, and Sogaz at 13.42 percent. Channel Five, which traces its institutional history back to 1938, is majority-owned by National Media Group at 72.43 percent. NTV, established in 1993, is controlled by Gazprom Media under Gazprombank. Gazprom-affiliated channels, including NTV and TNT, remain major players in weekly viewing figures through to late 2025. The NTV Plus satellite package alone reaches over 1.5 million viewers across 560,000 households.

• 5. The Digital Switchover

  ›

  Russia took exactly ten years to move from analogue to digital broadcasting. The starting point was a Government Resolution issued on the 29th of November 2007, which approved a concept paper for TV and radio broadcasting development covering 2008-2015. That commission had originally been chaired by Dmitry Medvedev in his capacity as first vice-chair of the government. Total investment in the transition was projected at ten billion euros.

  Before 2010, nearly half of the Russian population, 44 percent, could receive no more than four television channels. The first pilot project for digital TV launched in December 2005 in the Republic of Mordovia, testing the DVB-T standard. By September 2011 a government commission had approved the more advanced DVB-T2 standard for nationwide rollout, with the Tver Oblast used as a live test zone. On the 3rd of December 2009, the government approved the federal target programme covering 2009-2018.

  The analogue switch-off was carefully staged. In December 2018, the pilot Tver Region phased out analogue broadcasts of 20 federal channels. Through 2019 Russia completed the switchover in four stages: on the 11th of February covering 8 regions, on the 15th of April covering 20 regions, on the 3rd of June covering 36 regions, and on the 14th of October covering the final 21 regions. Russia became the first BRICS country to complete the analogue switch-off.

  The human logistics behind the switchover were substantial. Seventy thousand volunteers, 30,000 social workers, and 50,000 Russian Post employees participated in helping citizens set up receiving equipment. A dedicated digital television hotline opened in the run-up to the switch. Seventy-eight consultation centers operated in administrative centers across Russian regions. More than 11,000 analogue transmitters were put out of operation. The result was that 100 percent of the Russian population gained guaranteed access to 20 must-carry public television channels and three radio stations, with 98.4 percent reached through digital terrestrial transmission.

• 6. Pay TV and Satellite Growth

  ›

  Cable television arrived in Russia during the 2000s and grew quickly in the early 2010s. By 2012 it accounted for more than half of all pay-TV subscribers, at 58 percent. Operators began upgrading their networks to the DVB-C standard and adding services such as video on demand and catch-up TV. Most non-government-owned pay-TV channels were closed following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

  Satellite reception grew in parallel with cable. By May 2013 approximately 24 percent of Russia's 53 million TV homes were equipped for direct-to-home satellite reception, making satellite the country's leading digital platform. Between 2011 and 2013 the number of satellite homes rose 25 percent, from 8 million to 12.6 million. About 10 percent of those homes received signals from more than one satellite position, pushing the total number of antennas across the country to 13.8 million.

  The terrestrial distribution infrastructure underpinning all of this is managed by two federal bodies. The Russian Satellite Communications Company operates 11 satellites. The Russian TV and Radio Broadcasting Network serves 14,478 transmitters across Russia, representing 90.9 percent of all transmitters in the country. Signals reach all five Russian time zones through teleport facilities at Medvezhy Ozera, Vladimir, and Dubna. The domestic digital transmitter development program, called Multichannel, had already placed new equipment in Nizhny Novgorod and Saint Petersburg by 2001-2002, years before the formal digital transition began.