About Qütb TV

Qütb TV

Qütb TV was a private regional television channel based in Quba, in the north of Azerbaijan, which broadcast from 1995 until the spring of 2015. For two decades it was one of the small locally owned stations that carried television beyond the capital, Baku, serving viewers in Quba and the surrounding Guba-Khachmaz area in the Azerbaijani language. Its name, Qütb, is the Azerbaijani word for a pole — a fitting title, its founders appear to have intended, for a station positioned at the northern end of the country. The channel's headquarters stood at 156 Heydar Aliyev Avenue in Quba, and it transmitted on channel 27. Although Qütb TV never achieved national reach and left only a modest written record, it belonged to the first generation of Azerbaijani regional broadcasters created after independence, and its frequency outlived it: when the channel closed, a new children's service, Günəş TV, began broadcasting in its place. This profile sets out what can be verified about the station, and it states openly where the surviving record runs out.

Origins in Quba in 1995

Qütb TV was founded in 1995, when the Qütb Teleradio company was created in Quba. According to the channel's own recorded history, the company was established with a specific regional purpose: to provide the population living in the northern region of the republic with fuller information. That founding aim placed Qütb TV in a recognisable post-Soviet pattern. Azerbaijan's national television dated from 1956, but locally based private and regional stations were a product of the 1990s, when new broadcasters appeared in regional centres such as Ganja, Lankaran, Sheki and Quba to serve audiences whose daily lives were rarely reflected on the Baku channels. Qütb was the Quba entry in that wave. It was a private channel, not a state service, and it was Azerbaijani-language throughout its life. Its broadcast area is recorded simply as Quba and northern Azerbaijan; English-language listings of Azerbaijani regional television also placed its coverage in the Guba-Khachmaz and Mountainous Shirvan areas.

Founder Mahir Orucov and the Qütb Teleradio company

The founder of the channel was Mahir Orucov, whose name is attached to Qütb TV in reference works and in international media monitoring from the station's lifetime. Orucov appears, for example, in the panel lists of the IREX Media Sustainability Index for 2006–2007, where he is identified with Gutb TV of the Guba region — the name rendered in that source in an alternative transliteration and glossed as Horizon TV. That appearance is a small but useful piece of evidence: it shows that in the mid-2000s the channel's founder was recognised within Azerbaijan's media community as a regional broadcaster in his own right, taking part in the expert discussions through which international organisations assessed the condition of Azerbaijani media. Beyond that documented presence, little reliable biographical or corporate detail about Orucov or the Qütb Teleradio company survives in accessible sources, and this profile does not invent any. The company behind the channel should not be confused with later structures: reference listings for the channel's final period name the Region TV production union as its owner, reflecting the consolidation of regional stations into larger networks that marked Qütb's last years.

Broadcasting on channel 27 in the north

Qütb TV's programmes were transmitted on channel 27 in Quba. Its recorded weekly broadcast volume was 126 hours — the equivalent of eighteen hours a day across a seven-day week — which made it a substantial full-day service rather than a part-time local opt-out. A schedule of that size helps explain how a small regional station could hold a place in local viewing habits: for households in and around Quba, channel 27 offered a continuous alternative to the national networks, rooted in a studio a short distance away rather than in the capital. No surviving source consulted for this profile gives a verified audience figure, transmitter power or a precise coverage map for the station, and claims of that kind are not made here. What is documented is the channel's longevity: a local service that began in 1995 was still broadcasting twenty years later, through the whole period in which Azerbaijan moved from analogue-only television towards digital terrestrial transmission.

Programming and the shape of the schedule

The best surviving description of Qütb TV's output is a breakdown of its total airtime reported in Azerbaijani reference sources. Of the channel's overall broadcast time, 25 per cent consisted of programmes produced in the country, 52 per cent consisted of programmes produced abroad, and 23 per cent consisted of the station's own productions. Those figures, which the sources present as the channel's programme composition, describe a typical regional schedule of its era: a minority of home-made local programming, a further share of Azerbaijani national content, and a majority of imported material filling out the long broadcast day. For a station whose founding purpose was to inform the north, its own productions — the 23 per cent made in Quba itself — were the distinctive element, even if no programme titles, presenters' names or episode records for Qütb TV survive in the sources consulted. It would be wrong to reconstruct a programme guide that the record does not contain; what can honestly be said is that the channel combined local production with national and foreign content in roughly those proportions over a 126-hour week.

Place in the Quba-Khachmaz digital package

Qütb TV's position in northern viewing was confirmed in Azerbaijani reporting on the country's digital television switchover. A detailed account of the digital packages in the business journal Region Plus explained that, alongside the basic nationwide package, residents of the Quba-Khachmaz zone would receive a second, regional package — and it named the channels that package would contain for the north: Region TV, Qütb TV and Xayal TV, the other Quba-based regional station. The reference matters because it dates from the digital transition period, shortly before Qütb closed, and it shows the channel was still counted among the recognised regional services of its zone when the new distribution system was being built. In a country where, by official figures quoted in international references, television penetration stood at 99 per cent in 2014 and where dozens of regional channels competed for attention, a place in the regional digital package was the practical guarantee that a small station such as Qütb remained findable by its own audience.

Relationship with the Region TV network

In its final years Qütb TV was drawn into the consolidation that reshaped Azerbaijani regional television. Reference listings record the Region TV production union as the channel's owner, and list its sister channels as the services of that union, among them Region TV itself, Kəpəz TV in Ganja, Alternativ TV, Cənub TV in Lankaran, Kanal-S in Sheki, EL TV in Yevlakh and ARB 24. On 10 May 2014 six regional stations had combined to launch Region TV as a national network — the first television network of its kind in Azerbaijan — and in September 2016 that network was rebranded as ARB. Qütb TV did not survive long enough to take an ARB name: it closed in the spring of 2015, before the rebrand. Its association with the union nevertheless explains both the ownership recorded for its last period and the orderly way its frequency was reused, since the Quba slot within the regional system passed directly to a successor service rather than simply going dark.

Closure in the spring of 2015

Qütb TV ceased broadcasting in 2015, after exactly two decades on air. Azerbaijani reference sources give the closure date as 31 March 2015, and record that in April 2015 the channel's activity was stopped and Günəş TV began broadcasting on its frequency. No source consulted attributes the closure to a scandal, a licence revocation or a political dispute; the documented facts are the dates and the succession. The end of Qütb therefore reads less as a collapse than as a replacement within the regional system to which the channel by then belonged: the Quba frequency was worth keeping, but it was reassigned to a different kind of service. The channel's twenty-year run, from 1995 to 2015, spanned almost the entire first generation of independent Azerbaijani regional television, from the improvised beginnings of the 1990s to the networked, digital-era structure that replaced it.

Succession by Günəş TV

The successor on Qütb TV's frequency was Günəş TV, a children's channel that launched on 1 April 2015 — the day after Qütb's recorded closure date. Günəş, whose name means the Sun, was based in Quba and broadcast children's programming in Azerbaijani; in September 2016 it was rebranded as ARB Günəş when the Region TV network became ARB, and it was promoted as the country's first children's channel. Georgian and Azerbaijani reference works on Qütb TV likewise describe Günəş TV as the channel's continuation on its frequency. The succession is worth recording because it shows what became of the local broadcasting presence Qütb had built: the north did not lose its Quba-based service, but the general regional channel founded in 1995 was replaced by a specialised national children's channel produced within the same network family.

What the record does not show

Honesty about Qütb TV requires an explicit account of the gaps. The channel has no dedicated entry in most English-language references beyond listings of Azerbaijani regional television; its detailed history survives mainly in Azerbaijani-language reference material. No verified circulation or ratings figures, no staff lists beyond its founder, no programme titles, no financial information and no archived schedule were found in the sources consulted for this profile, and its former website, if it maintained one in its later years, is not recorded in the batch documentation. Where figures are given here — the 126-hour week and the percentage composition of airtime — they are the figures the surviving reference record itself reports, not estimates constructed for this profile. Readers should treat Qütb TV's history as well evidenced in outline — founding, place, founder, scale, network association, closure and succession — and undocumented in most of its day-to-day detail.

Legacy

Qütb TV's legacy is that of a durable local institution rather than a famous one. For twenty years it gave Quba and Azerbaijan's north a television service of their own, founded explicitly to supply the region with fuller information at a time when regional voices were first entering Azerbaijani broadcasting. It carried a full broadcast week on channel 27, mixed its own Quba-made productions with national and imported programmes, found a place in the digital package designed for the Quba-Khachmaz zone, and was represented by its founder in the media-policy discussions of the 2000s. It then closed without drama in March 2015 and handed its frequency to a children's channel that still connects its story to the present-day ARB network. As a directory entry, Qütb TV stands as a reminder that Azerbaijani television history was not made only in Baku: in Quba, for two decades, it was also made on channel 27, in Azerbaijani, by a small company named Qütb Teleradio.