Television in Switzerland


Television in Switzerland was introduced in 1950. People who live in Switzerland and receive television services are required by law to pay a television licence fee, which is used to finance the public radio and television service SRG SSR. Licence fee-payers in all the linguistic regions of Switzerland all pay the same amount and, in return, are entitled under the law to services of equal quality.

History

The history of television in Switzerland began in 1939 when the first test transmissions commenced. Regular transmissions started in 1953, at first only one hour a day for five days a week, and only in German: transmissions in French started in 1954 and in Italian only in 1958.
Romansh-speaking Swiss had to wait until 1963 for the first programme in their language, a full decade after regular television transmission were initiated. To this day, there is no dedicated Romansh-language channel; instead the German and Italian channels air a few hours of Romansh programming per day. The 1960s also saw the arrival of television advertising, in 1964, and of colour television, in 1968.
Télévision suisse romande broadcast their first evening programme in colour in 1968. 1968 was also the first year where more than one million Swiss households had a television.
In 1984, the Swiss teletext service, SwissTXT, was started. In 1993 a fourth SRG SSR channel was created, first named "S Plus" but later renamed Schweiz 4. However, this was short-lived: during its existence the channel constantly suffered low ratings and was hence shut down in 1997. In the same year, as a result, all the SRG SSR subsidiaries started a second channel, and SRF zwei, RTS Deux and RSI La 2 came into existence.
Analogue television was phased out starting July 2006, when TSI began the analogue switchoff. The process continued until January 2008, when the end of analogue broadcasting in Valais and Chablais completed the digital television transition in Switzerland.
In September 2018, SRG SSR announced that it would discontinue over-the-air broadcasting in DVB-T in 2019, citing costs, rather than implement DVB-T2. The services will remain available via encrypted free-to-view satellite, which offers all SRG SSR channels in high definition.

List of channels

The following is a list of television channels broadcast in Switzerland:

German-speaking Switzerland

The channels with the largest viewing share in 2019 are:
PositionChannelGroupShare of
total viewing
1SRF 1SRG SSR19.2
2SRF zweiSRG SSR9.9
3ZDFZDF5.7
4RTLRTL Group5.3
5Das ErsteARD5.2
6Sat.1ProSiebenSat.1 Media3.5
7VOXRTL Group3.1
8ProSiebenProSiebenSat.1 Media2.8
9RTL IIRTL Group2.1
10SRF infoSRG SSR2.0

French-speaking Switzerland

There is not a television channel broadcasting exclusively in Romansh language; instead, Radio Television Rumantscha's productions are transmitted on SRF 1, RSI La 2 and SRF info a few minutes a day. Programming includes Telesguard, Cuntrasts and l'Istorgia da buna notg.

Regional channels

Local radio and television networks in Switzerland are entitled to 4% of the licence fee every year. The number of subsidised television broadcasters is limited to 13, one for each designated coverage area. Also, the support share cannot exceed 50% of the operating costs of each network.
A vast majority of the country is covered by cable networks; the major cable television operators is upc cablecom.
In 2007, the Federal Office of Communications applied a must-carry regulation, requiring the local cable companies to transmit all the SRG SSR network stations and the following foreign channels: arte, 3sat, Euronews, TV5MONDE, ARD, ORF eins, France 2, Rai Uno.

International channels

All public and most commercial channels from the neighbouring countries are widely available in Switzerland through digital television services.