Televisión de Antares

Televisió d'Antares (Catalan: Television of Antares) is the state-run television broadcaster of Antares. Founded in 1981 to promote local Communist ideologies, it has since become a standard ASESON public television channel.

History

When Antares was still a kingdom, the idea of a national television channel was not in the plans. Antares has been one of the poorest countries in the world since obtaining independence in 1911, in the wake of the Nosghelian plans for "de-annexing" external territories (it and the Sentinelese Republic) due to being loss-making for the country.

When Antares turned into a Communist state in 1975, one of the many plans to "modernize" the country was by introducing a television service that broadcast ideals of the party to households nationwide. The problem was essentially a lack of television transmitters to help beam the signal.

In 1979, the Nosghelian government-run Nosghelian Television, in an unexpected turn of events, said that it would help the upstart Televisió d'Antares for the equipment. Antares adopted the NTSC format and settled on channel 11 for the transmitter in Bellregard. In October of 1980, said transmitter began tests for eventual demonstrational purposes.

On May 1, 1981, Televisió d'Antares started regular broadcasts. Initially they were limited to the region of Bellregard, as other television transmitters were being built in order to cover the seven regions. Broadcasts were limited to an hour a day at first, and this included news bulletins, based on those broadcast by Soviet television, programming favoring the cult of personality and Communism and, oddly enough, some programs dubbed in Taixo, a language many Soviet intels thought it was dead owing to the widespread usage of Catalan.

A limited number of foreign programs arrived to TVA. These included Nosghelian entertainment shows, Nosghelian television series and some productions from Communist and non-Communist countries, yet were mostly edited (entire sections of some programs had to be cut out) not just due to time purposes (the channel could afford four hours of broadcasting a day) but also due to ideologies. TVA began screening Catalan series in 1984, but some episodes had to be either pulled or heavily edited.

A major breakthrough for TVA was the coverage of the Sandong olympics of 1988. It was the first event from the outside world that TVA had broadcast, and this almost hurt the country's economy. TVA broadcast little events featuring Antarian athletes.

In October of 1991, a civil war erupted in Antares, dividing the small country into the People's Republic of North Antares and the Republic of South Antares. Relays in South Antares blocked TVA in favor of a new broadcaster, Televisió Lliure d'Antares (Free Television of Antares). When the civil war ended in January of the following year, TVA couldn't afford to rebuild its network and a brief period of disparity between TVA and TVLA emerged. In October 1992, Antares became a democratic republic, ending the Communist domination that lasted for seventeen years. The government liberalized the television sector and asked Nosghelian broadcasters to help redevelop the extant infrastructure.

Programming

• Telediari: The longest-running program in Antares, having premiered in 1981 as a brief newscast covering the Antarian Communist Party. As the years went on, Telediari changed from just a five-minute newscast to a quarter-hour newscast, based on Vremya, focusing on a wider range of topics, as long as they were deemed acceptable by the regime. TVLA had its own Telediari, Telediari Lliure, during the civil war and the inequal phase that followed for part of 1992. Now it's TVA's most-popular program, even though it still is divided mostly due to strict editorial control and the dominance of the two commercial channels.

Criticism

Post-Communist censorship

TVA has been accused by dissidents and members of commercial broadcasters for manipulating the news and apparently "censoring" references to allegedly "evil" politicians. Upon the election of the then-new Nosghelian president Ricardo Duterte in 2016, TVA simply refused to show reports of him, claiming that "Duterte is a fictional character". As a consequence TVA has been fined by the Presidential Communications Office and the Government of Nosghel for the allegedly false information.

In the past few years, censorship of foreign programs on TVA has been quite common, particularly since the channel is funded by the government. The reverse has happened to TVA when it exported some of its fiction series to Nosghel - poor editing in Antares and lack of "moral censorship" has resulted in Nosghelian channels censoring the "filthier" elements because it promoted vice.

Advertising

TVA was sustained by advertising between 1989 and 1993. The arrival of Canal 7, the first Antarian commercial channel, affected TVA's ad revenue so hard that it had to ban commercial advertising for entities that weren't owned by the state.