About dorf TV

dorf TV

dorf TV is a non-commercial community television channel based in Linz, the capital of Upper Austria. Broadcasting since 22 June 2010, it is a 24-hour participatory channel — the "dorf", or "village", in its name is written in lower case as a stylistic signature — on which individuals, organisations and institutions make their own programmes with the station's support. dorf TV describes itself as an independent, non-commercial television station sitting at the junction between culture, social affairs, political education and the teaching of media skills, with open access as its founding principle. It is one of only three community television channels in Austria, alongside Okto in Vienna, which launched in 2005, and FS1 in Salzburg, which followed in 2012, and it is a member of the Alliance of Community Television Austria.

The channel grew out of Linz's distinctive cultural scene — the city of the Ars Electronica festival and of a long tradition of media art and free radio — and its origins in the artist and activist milieu explain its character: dorf TV has always treated television not only as a news medium but as an artistic and democratic instrument, a place where a city and a region can experiment with seeing themselves.

Origins: an idea from the Ars Electronica milieu

Research on Austrian community broadcasting traces dorf TV's conception to 2005, when a group of artists and media activists — among them Otto Tremetzberger, Gabrielle Kepplinger and Georg Ritter — developed the idea of an interactive, open-access television channel for Linz. The project was an outgrowth of the environment of the Ars Electronica Festival, the world-renowned festival for art, technology and society held in Linz, and it drew on the experience of Stadtwerkstatt TV, the television experiments of Linz's Stadtwerkstatt cultural centre, and on the Austrian community radio movement. The founders' concept, articulated by Tremetzberger in 2005, was of "TV as an instrument of art". A funding and development programme in 2008 moved the initiative from concept toward construction, and the first broadcasts took place via digital terrestrial transmission before the channel's full launch on 22 June 2010.

That five-year path from idea to air is characteristic of community media, which must assemble funding, licences, premises and volunteer structures without the capital of a commercial broadcaster. It also placed dorf TV second in the Austrian sequence: Okto had proven the community television model in Vienna from 2005, and Linz's channel adapted it to a smaller city with an unusually strong media-art identity, supported from the community radio scene — notably Radio FRO, Linz's free radio station, whose milieu nurtured the television project as it had nurtured participatory radio since the 1990s.

Launch and development

dorf TV began broadcasting on 22 June 2010 and established itself as a 24-hour participatory channel for Linz and Upper Austria. Channel listings record its distribution by DVB-T terrestrial transmission across parts of Upper Austria; terrestrial listings for the Linz and Steyr area have carried dorf tv as a free channel alongside the region's commercial regionals. The station's programmes are also available on demand through its own online presence, linked from the Austrian free broadcasting association's on-demand services. Over its years on air the channel has become, in the words of the Festival der Regionen, an important pillar of Upper Austria's media landscape — a fixed institution of the region's cultural life as well as a broadcaster. The station is operated as DORF TV GmbH; the Austrian free broadcasting association's board pages record that in January 2026 Kathrina Becker, who came to community media through free radio in Freistadt and a background in media production, took over as the company's managing director, articulating the station's mission as providing a non-violent media space in which all members of society can illuminate the small and large questions of their lives.

How dorf TV works: open access

Like its sister channels, dorf TV inverts the usual relationship between broadcaster and audience. The station does not primarily commission programmes; it opens its facilities to the public. Individuals, organisations and institutions from the region produce their own content, and the station provides the platform, training and technical support. Its self-description identifies four meeting points for its work: culture, the social sphere, political education and the dissemination of media competence — the skills that let citizens not only consume media critically but produce it themselves. Through this open access, the station states, it promotes diversity of information as the critical foundation for cultural pluralism, social justice and democratic development. In practice that means the schedule of dorf TV is a rolling portrait of Upper Austrian civil society: cultural initiatives, social projects, educational programmes, artistic experiments and community debates, made by the people they concern.

Programming and projects

Alongside its open-access schedule, dorf TV undertakes distinctive projects of its own, often in partnership with the region's cultural institutions. A documented example is its work with the Festival der Regionen, Upper Austria's festival of contemporary art and culture in the regions: taking the festival's theme of "social warmth", dorf TV acted as the festival's mobile media laboratory in the Perg-Strudengau region, recording and broadcasting debates on the theme in deliberately unconventional formats — mobile-phone streaming, "Talking Camera", one-shot filming, live and live-on-tape contributions — rather than classical news coverage. The station described its role as a "Durchlauferhitzer", a kind of media water-heater on the move, sharpening and accelerating the festival's discussions as it travelled between central locations, working with festival participants, artists, guests and local people. The project captures the channel's method in miniature: television as a participatory process let loose in public space, not a studio product delivered to passive viewers.

The channel's wider output reflects its supporting community: it is backed by community media organisations including Radio FRO and by the Crossing Europe film festival, Linz's festival of European cinema, whose milieu contributes to the city's screen culture. Programmes flow from the region's cultural, social and political initiatives, and the station's presence at festivals and public events across Upper Austria is part of its programming model — dorf TV goes to where its community is, rather than waiting for the community to come to a studio.

Distribution and how to watch

dorf TV is distributed terrestrially: channel listings record reception via DVB-T across parts of Upper Austria, and platform listings for the Linz–Steyr region include dorf tv among the free regional channels. Its programmes are additionally available online on demand through its website, which the Verband Freier Rundfunk Österreich links as the channel's programme archive. As with other Austrian community channels, the combination of a terrestrial licence in its home region and open online availability defines its footprint: strongest in Linz and Upper Austria, where its community lives, but watchable anywhere by anyone interested in the region's cultural and civic life.

The Austrian community television trio

dorf TV belongs to a sector of exactly three: Austria's non-commercial community television channels with 24-hour full programmes are Okto in Vienna, dorf TV in Linz and FS1 in Salzburg. Sector histories describe their development in sequential, overlapping phases — Vienna in 2005, Linz in 2010, Salzburg in 2012–13 — each arising independently within its local social, economic, political and technical environment, and each developing within the governance and funding framework of the media regulator RTR, complemented by local and regional government support. The three are joined in the Alliance of Community Television Austria (VCFÖ), founded in 2010, and the wider free broadcasting association. dorf TV's particular contribution to the trio is its artistic lineage: where Okto grew from Vienna's associational and academic life and FS1 from Salzburg's community radio shareholder movement, dorf TV grew from media art — from Ars Electronica and Stadtwerkstatt — and that origin still marks its experimental approach to formats.

Funding and institutional setting

As a non-commercial broadcaster, dorf TV is sustained by the funding architecture Austria built for its third broadcasting sector: grants from the RTR's Non-Commercial Broadcasting Fund, support from the city and the region, and project funding of the kind that carried it from the 2008 development programme to its 2010 launch. This model deliberately separates the channel from both advertising markets and direct state control: money comes from a dedicated fund administered by the regulator and from public cultural and media budgets, while editorial control rests with the station and its community of producers. The arrangement reflects the Austrian settlement for community media generally — recognised in law and policy as a third pillar beside public and commercial broadcasting, funded modestly but structurally, and valued for diversity and participation rather than for audience size.

What the public record shows — and what it does not

The documented record for dorf TV covers its conception in 2005 and its named founders, its Stadtwerkstatt TV and Ars Electronica roots, the 2008 funding programme, its launch on 22 June 2010, its DVB-T distribution in Upper Austria, its open-access remit and its documented festival projects, as well as its current corporate leadership through the free broadcasting association's published board information. The record is thinner on the quantitative side: audience figures are not published for community channels in the sources consulted, and detailed schedules, staff numbers and budgets are not public. This profile therefore describes dorf TV's model, history and documented projects without inventing metrics the record does not contain, and it presents the channel's own mission statements as what they are — the station's account of itself, corroborated in its essentials by independent research on the sector.

Why dorf TV matters

dorf TV matters because it brought the participatory idea of television to Austria's cultural capital of the regions — and fused it with that city's media-art DNA. In Linz, television at dorf TV is simultaneously a community noticeboard, a classroom for media skills, a stage for the region's cultural life and an artistic instrument in the tradition of the Ars Electronica milieu from which it sprang. For Upper Austria it provides the non-commercial counterweight to the state's commercial regionals and the ORF: a channel whose schedule no scheduler fully controls, because it belongs to the citizens and initiatives who fill it. In the small history of Austrian broadcasting, its 2010 launch completed the proof — begun by Okto in Vienna — that community television was not a Viennese exception but a durable Austrian institution.