Digital terrestrial television in Finland was launched on August 21, 2001. The analogue networks continued its broadcasts alongside the digital ones until September 1, 2007, when they were shut down nationwide. Before the analogue switchoff, the terrestrial network had three multiplexes: MUX A, MUX B and MUX C. MUX A contained the channels of the public broadcaster

Yleisradio Yleisradio Oy (; ), abbreviated as Yle () (formerly styled in all uppercase until 2012), translated into English as the Finnish Broadcasting Company, is Finland's national public broadcasting company, founded in 1926. It is a joint-stock comp ...

and MUX B was shared between the two commercial broadcasters:

MTV3 MTV3 (, ) is a Finnish commercial television channel owned and operated by the media company MTV Oy, originally launched on 13 August 1957 as a programming block, becoming its own channel on 1 January 1993. It had the biggest audience share ...

and Nelonen. MUX C contained channels of various other broadcasters. After the analogue closedown, a fourth multiplex named MUX E was launched. All Yles channels are broadcast free-to-air, so are a few commercial ones including

, Nelonen, Sub, Jim, Nelonen Pro 2 and Kutonen. There are also several pay channels. These are sold only by PlusTV.

History

The official launch took place on August 21, 2001. Under the original plans the channel's available would be, other than the four analogue ones: Yle's news channel ( YLE24), Yle's cultural and educational channel (

YLE Teema Yle Teema was a Finnish television channel owned and operated by Finnish public broadcasting company Yle. The channel was dedicated to culture, science Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of ...

), Yle's Swedish channel ( FST), a regional station (

CityTV Citytv (sometimes shortened to City, which was the network's official branding from 2012 to 2018) is a Television in Canada, Canadian television network owned by the Rogers Sports & Media subsidiary of Rogers Communications. The network consis ...

), a sports channel ( Urheilukanava), a film channel from Helsinki Media (Elokuvakanava), a "school channel" from WSOY (Alfa+), a lifestyle channel ( Wellnet) and

Canal+ Canals or artificial waterways are waterways or engineered channels built for drainage management (e.g. flood control and irrigation) or for conveyancing water transport vehicles (e.g. water taxi). They carry free, calm surface flo ...

. The Yle's channels, MTV3, Nelonen and Urheilukanava (later renamed Nelonen Sport) were on board from the start. WSOY eventually decided to withdraw from the project without launching their channel, as did Canal+ and Elokuvakanava. CityTV eventually turned into the entertainment channel SubTV. In 2003, MTV Oy started en "extra" channels, MTV3+, which offered some extra sports content. Nelonen also had an extra channel called Nelonen Plus. TV Viisi started in March 2004. Canal Digital launched pay television with three Canal+ channels in March 2004. A fourth Canal+ channel, Canal+ Sport was added in November. The

Disney Channel Disney Channel is an American pay television television channel, channel that serves as the flagship (broadcasting), flagship property of Disney Branded Television, a unit of the Disney Entertainment business segment of the Walt Disney Company ...

was added in April 2006 and KinoTV, Eurosport, Discovery, MTV and Nickelodeon in September 2007. In September 2008 the rival operator PlusTV got exclusive rights to all, but CANAL+ channels and Canal Digital was left with them only. The last move in Canal Digital's antenna operations in Finland took place on September 16, 2009, when PlusTV got exclusive rights to CANAL+ channels too. Nowadays Canal Digital operates only via satellite. PlusTV was launched in November 2006, originally only broadcasting MTV3 Max and Subtv Juniori. They added Subtv Leffa in April and Urheilu+kanava in June 2007. Both packages got more channels with the launch of MUX E in September 2007: SVT Europa and MTV3 Fakta was added to PlusTV and KinoTV was added to Canal Digital, while

Discovery Channel Discovery Channel, known as The Discovery Channel from 1985 to 1995, and often referred to as simply Discovery, is an American cable channel that is best known for its ongoing reality television shows and promotion of pseudoscience. It init ...

Eurosport Eurosport is a group of pay television networks in Europe and parts of Asia, owned and operated by Warner Bros. Discovery through its WBD Sports unit, it operates two main channels—Eurosport 1 and Eurosport 2—across most of its territorie ...

MTV Finland MTV Finland was a music and entertainment channel broadcasting to the Finnish market. The channel replaced MTV Nordic on September 18, 2005; however, on February 22, 2019, it was replaced by the return of MTV Nordic. History * MTV Finland l ...

and

Nickelodeon Nickelodeon (nicknamed Nick) is an American pay television channel and the flagship property of the Nickelodeon Group, a sub-division of the Paramount Media Networks division of Paramount Global. Launched on April 1, 1979, as the first ca ...

were added to both packages. September 2007 also saw the launch of the SveaTV package in Ostrobothnia which broadcasts

Swedish language Swedish ( ) is a North Germanic languages, North Germanic language from the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family, spoken predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland. It has at least 10 million native speakers, making it the G ...

channels from a special multiplex. On the digital platform, subtitling isn't a part of the video stream, but is delivered as a separate data stream, which allows subtitling in multiple languages and the option to remove subtitles. Due to technical problems with the subtitles, many people cancelled their television licenses. This meant that Yle had to make drastic budget cuts. The digital channel YLE Extra was closed on December 31, 2007 and was replaced by YLE TV1+, a simulcast of TV1 with subtitles included in the video stream. TV1+ was replaced by SVT Europa in September 2008. PlusTV took over Canal Digital's basic channel package ParempiTV on October 1, 2008. This meant that subscriptions for all pay channels were handled by PlusTV, with the exception of the Canal+ channels, which were still sold by Canal Digital. The pornographic channel Canal 69 ended its broadcasts in August 2009. On September 10, 2009, the news pay sports channel URHOtv starts broadcasting.

References

External links

DigiTV
{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090205173120/http://digitv.fi/default.asp?path=9 , date=2009-02-05

Finland Finland, officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It borders Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of Bothnia to the west and the Gulf of Finland to the south, ...

Television in Finland

History

See also

References

External links