About Litus TV

Litus TV

Litus TV is the television channel of the Universidad Nacional del Litoral, in the city of Santa Fe, Argentina. It began programming on digital terrestrial television on 9 December 2015, with the inauguration of the university's multimedia space, and it broadcasts on TDA channel 28. Litus shares its daytime hours in duplex with the university's radio station LT10, whose programmes it transmits live with added audiovisual material, and in the evening it produces its own cultural, educational and scientific programming. It forms part of the UNL's multimedia system alongside LT10, FM X, the university's web news operation and UNL Noticias. Litus TV has no separate official website in the seed record for this profile; its public presence runs through the Universidad Nacional del Litoral and the LT10 multimedia platforms, and its launch-era site was litustv.com.ar.

The channel's name and concept set it apart from a conventional university channel. Litus was designed from the start as a convergent medium: what is generated for one platform of the UNL system is generated for all, so that radio journalism and university cultural production meet in a single television signal with two distinct halves to its day.

The UNL multimedia system

Litus TV joined an existing university media system composed of LT10, the UNL's historic AM radio station, FM X, the lt10.com.ar website and UNL Noticias. Romina Kippes, the university's Director of Communication and the person responsible for putting the new medium into operation, explained at the launch that Litus responded to a different and novel concept of television in its management and content production, following a logic of integrated generation in which media convergence was the fundamental characteristic.

That system context explains the channel's structure. Litus did not need to build a newsroom from nothing: LT10 already produced journalism for Santa Fe every day. Nor did it need to invent a cultural remit: the university's faculties, institutes and cultural bodies already generated the documentaries, science and arts content a university channel requires. Litus was the television layer placed over those two existing productive systems, joining them in one signal. As Kippes observed, it was no coincidence that on the same day as the signal's launch the university also presented a complete new web platform for LT10; the channel and the platform were two faces of one convergence project.

First transmission, 9 December 2015

The night of 9 December 2015 was chosen for the ceremony that gave Litus its first transmission and inaugurated the university's multimedia space, described as a historic moment for the UNL's media. At 19:00 a special transmission began in duplex with LT10; at 20:10 a theatrical performance by Santa Fe artists gave way to the ceremony itself. Miguel Irigoyen, the incoming rector, gave the inaugural speech, and words sent by Albor Cantard, rector of the institution for the previous eight years, were also heard. The ribbon of the multimedia space was then cut; the space had opened in 2015 and was to house the multimedia operation in 2017.

The transmission could be seen at litustv.com.ar, through signal 28 of the TDA and through signal 15 of Cablevideo Digital — in one launch-era account given as channel 14 of that system. Those carriage details fix the channel's original footprint: digital terrestrial television in Santa Fe, one local cable system, and streaming. It was a city and university signal, not a provincial network, and its ambitions were defined in terms of content and convergence rather than territorial reach.

The two halves of the Litus day

The channel's own description divides its content into two large areas that feed each other. From 7:00 to 19:00, Litus transmits the radio programmes of LT10, adding all the audiovisual material necessary to build a kind of news programme with live mobile units at the scene of events and with the immediacy that radio requires. Television viewers therefore watch radio journalism enhanced for the screen, rather than a separately produced television news service.

From 19:00 to 7:00, the relationship reverses: Litus TV becomes a powerhouse of cultural, educational and scientific content of its own production and university quality. Documentaries, fiction and general-interest programmes form part of its highlighted local productions in that evening and overnight band. The university summarised the concept in its anniversary accounts: the channel is where the journalistic content generated by Radio LT10 meets the cultural, educational and scientific content produced jointly with the university sphere, made by a versatile and flexible work team that adapts to different content needs and platforms.

Networks and exchanged content

Litus does not fill its evening hours from its own production alone. Through the network of university contents, the channel carries productions from other university channels in Argentina. It has also reached agreements with Ibero-American networks and foreign channels that cede part of their content and, in turn, feed on Litus's productions.

That exchange logic is a structural feature of Argentine university television. Individual university channels are small; their libraries are limited; but a national network of such channels, created under the same 2009 audiovisual law framework that authorised university signals, can circulate documentaries and series among all its members. Litus's participation in that network, and its agreements beyond Argentina, place a Santa Fe university signal inside a Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking circulation of university content, as both receiver and supplier.

LT10 and radio with pictures

The duplex with LT10 deserves emphasis because it is Litus's most original trait. Many university channels rebroadcast lectures or ceremonies; Litus rebroadcasts a working news radio station for twelve hours a day, adding cameras, graphics and live mobiles to radio's speed. The model accepts radio's strengths — immediacy, local knowledge, an established Santa Fe audience — and gives them a television surface, at a fraction of the cost of a stand-alone television newsroom.

It also makes Litus part of Santa Fe's daily news competition in a way most university channels are not. When an event breaks in the city, Litus's daytime screen carries the same live coverage as one of the city's principal radio stations, with pictures. The channel's identity is thus double in a precise sense: a news service by day, carried by radio; a university cultural service by night, carried by its own production team.

The multimedia space

The 9 December 2015 ceremony also inaugurated the university's multimedia space, the physical home of the convergent operation, which was to house the multimedia system in 2017. The seed record for this profile describes the same event as the inauguration of the university's multimedia space alongside the start of programming. Building a shared space was the material counterpart of the convergence idea: radio, television and web teams working in one place, with shared material, rather than in separate buildings with separate routines.

The UNL returned to the date in its own institutional memory, marking the channel's fourth anniversary on 9 December 2019 with an account that restated its founding concept and its two-part schedule. Such anniversary accounts are useful evidence of continuity: four years after launch, the university still described Litus in the same terms — LT10 in duplex by day, own cultural, educational and scientific production by night, network content in addition — indicating a format that had settled rather than been abandoned.

Litus among Argentina's university channels

Litus belongs to the generation of Argentine university channels authorised after the 2009 Audiovisual Communication Services Law, of which TV Universidad of La Plata, launched in 2012, was the first. Litus, arriving in 2015, shows how the model developed: where La Plata built a generalist university channel, Santa Fe built a convergent one, fusing an existing radio station and a university production system into a single signal.

Within Santa Fe itself, Litus completes a three-layer public and educational television landscape alongside the commercial network stations and the provincial state channel 5RTV. The provincial channel represents the province; Litus represents the university. Both are public media, but their remits differ — territorial integration in one case, knowledge and culture joined to city journalism in the other — and Santa Fe is unusual in Argentina for sustaining both, plus a university radio station of LT10's standing, within one city.

Current status and significance

Litus TV remains the television channel of the Universidad Nacional del Litoral, broadcasting on TDA channel 28 in Santa Fe, transmitting LT10 live in its daytime duplex and its own cultural, educational and scientific programming in the evening, as part of the UNL multimedia system. Its launch facts are firm: first transmission and inauguration of the multimedia space on 9 December 2015, a special duplex broadcast with LT10 beginning at 19:00 that evening, inaugural words from incoming rector Miguel Irigoyen and from Albor Cantard, and initial carriage on TDA 28, local cable and the web.

Its significance lies in the model it proved. Litus showed that a university channel did not have to imitate commercial television or confine itself to academic ceremony: by treating convergence as its founding principle — one team, one newsroom, content made for every platform at once — it produced a sustainable local signal from resources a public university already had. For Santa Fe, it added a television screen to the voice of LT10 and a nightly window for the university's cultural and scientific work. For Argentine university television, it remains one of the clearest worked examples of the convergent multimedia idea that the post-2009 generation of channels was created to explore.