About ALT TV

ALT TV

ALT TV was a regional television channel based in Armavir, the administrative centre of Armenia's Armavir region, west of Yerevan. It was directed by Khachik Danielyan. A study of Armenian regional television by the Media Initiatives Center counted ALT among the country's early regional broadcasters, placing it in the first generation of local stations that emerged outside the capital. The channel is documented most fully in connection with the struggle of Armenia's regional stations to survive the transition from analogue to digital broadcasting: ALT joined the regional channels' open letter of November 2013 protesting their exclusion from the digital multiplexes, and in 2016 Danielyan publicly argued that small regional channels should have been allowed to form their own regional multiplex rather than face closure under the digital broadcasting law. This profile records those verified facts, sets them in the context of Armenian regional television, and states openly how much about ALT TV the surviving record does not contain.

Armavir and its regional channel

Armavir region lies in the Ararat plain west of Yerevan, one of Armenia's most densely populated and agriculturally productive areas, and the city of Armavir is its centre. A regional channel based there served viewers whose daily concerns — agriculture, irrigation, local markets, municipal services, schools and the region's towns and villages — received limited attention from capital-based national broadcasters. Armenian media researchers consistently made the same point about such stations: regional channels were valuable resources because they offered a close look at issues relevant to the local population, from local government decisions to local events, and they embodied the principle that there is more to Armenia than Yerevan. ALT TV was Armavir's expression of that model. It is listed among the signatories of the Code of Ethics of Armenian Media and Journalists maintained by the Yerevan Press Club as the ALT TV company of Armavir, alongside regional peers including Mig TV and Ankyun+3, which confirms its recognised standing in the professional community of Armenian broadcasters.

An early regional broadcaster

The Media Initiatives Center's study of Armenian regional television listed ALT-TV among the country's early regional broadcasters. That classification matters because the first regional stations were pioneers: they were created in the years after independence, when Armenian broadcasting expanded beyond the Soviet-era state system and private companies began serving individual cities and regions for the first time. No verified source consulted for this profile gives the exact year of ALT TV's founding, its original frequency, its ownership structure or the names of its staff beyond its director, and this profile does not supply those details from conjecture. What the early-broadcaster classification does establish is longevity of a kind: ALT was not a short-lived entrant of the digital era but a station rooted in the formative period of Armenian regional television, still active and still speaking for its region two decades later when the digital transition threatened its existence.

Leadership under Khachik Danielyan

Khachik Danielyan is documented as the director of ALT TV and as the station's public advocate. His recorded contribution is distinctive because it was not only defensive. Where many statements by regional broadcasters simply protested their treatment, Danielyan put forward a constructive technical and legal proposal: that small regional channels should have been allowed to form their own regional multiplex. That argument, made publicly in 2016 as the analogue switch-off approached, aligned with the position developed over several years by Armenian media-support organisations. Ashot Melikyan of the Committee to Protect Freedom of Expression had argued, in the same debate, that if Armenia had followed the experience of neighbouring Georgia — which switched to digital in July 2015 and allowed several small and medium-sized multiplexers instead of one large single operator — the left-out stations could have teamed up to create small multiplexers and continued their professional activity. Danielyan's proposal from Armavir was the broadcasters' version of the same idea: cooperation among small channels as an alternative to closure. The record preserves his position, though not the internal history of the station he led.

The digital broadcasting law and regional exclusion

To understand ALT TV's documented history, the structure of Armenia's digital transition must be understood. Amendments adopted in 2010 to the Law on Television and Radio determined that each region and city would have one single private television company operating digitally. In all, 27 stations held digital licences — eight broadcasting nationwide, ten in Yerevan and nine in the regions. The model sounded, to the twelve regional channels left outside it, like a death sentence: companies without a digital licence could operate only for a limited transition period, and not all of them would receive one. The plan assumed that a privately operated multiplexer would eventually carry the excluded channels, but the competition for that private multiplexer failed for lack of applicants; the requirements, as Melikyan explained, were demanding and unattractive, and the tender was cancelled. A public multiplexer began operating from 1 July 2015 for the licensed stations, while the unlicensed regional companies remained on analogue, losing audience as viewers migrated to digital and losing advertisers with them. Protests and expert recommendations led to the transition deadline being extended, first to the end of 2015 and then to the end of 2016, but the underlying model was never changed. ALT TV lived through this entire sequence as one of the excluded stations.

The open letter of November 2013

In November 2013, six regional outlets acted together: Lori, MIG and Ankyun+3 from Lori region, ALT from Armavir region, Ijevan from Tavush region and Hrazdan from Kotayk region. They wrote an open letter to the President of Armenia, the Speaker of the National Assembly and the Prime Minister, voicing their concern that the cessation of analogue transmission made their work useless, since their programmes were not available to consumers. They added that they had clearly been deprived of advertisers as a result of the situation, and that because the competition for a private multiplexer had not taken place that year due to the absence of applications, it was more likely that their companies would close than that a private multiplexer would appear. The letter fell on deaf ears: the senders received no response. ALT's participation in the letter is significant because it shows the Armavir station acting not in isolation but as part of a coordinated regional sector — six stations from five regions making a joint, documented appeal about a shared structural problem, three years before the switch-off they feared actually took place.

The 2016 argument for a regional multiplex

By 2016 the question was no longer hypothetical. Armenia completed its move to digital broadcasting with the analogue switch-off that began on 26 October 2016 and was completed in November 2016; eleven regional television companies were left outside the digital system. In that year Danielyan publicly argued that small regional channels should have been allowed to form their own regional multiplex rather than face closure under the digital broadcasting law. In November 2016 the heads of six regional companies again addressed an open letter to the President, the Speaker and the Prime Minister, noting that after the switch-off they had been deprived of audience and stood on the brink of closing down, and a coalition of media organisations issued a statement calling the closure of eleven local companies in the digital era — an era in which technical capacity for broadcasting is practically limitless — intolerable and unacceptable. Danielyan's multiplex proposal belonged to that same moment of advocacy. It was not adopted. The law was not revised in the direction he proposed, and opposition parliamentarians who called the licensing process unfair lacked the votes to change it. For the directory record, the proposal stands as ALT TV's clearest documented contribution to Armenian media policy debate.

Regional television and media diversity in Armenia

ALT TV's story is one instance of a national pattern that journalists and rights groups documented extensively. Armenia's regional broadcasters were, as a group, small, locally financed and editorially close to their communities, and the digital model adopted in 2010 reduced their number by design. Commentators on the transition, including the Yerevan Press Club and the Media Initiatives Center, warned that reducing the number of regional channels would sharpen the shortage of diversity and pluralism in Armenian television and increase monopolisation of the broadcasting sphere. The experience of Lori region, where one station received the digital permit and the others did not, was widely cited as evidence that political connections influenced who survived. Against that background, ALT TV's documented acts — co-signing the 2013 letter and proposing a regional multiplex in 2016 — represent the organised response of the regional sector itself. The channel's profile in this directory should be read in that light: not as a major national broadcaster, but as a documented participant in one of the defining media-policy disputes of Armenia in the 2010s.

Programming and audience: the limits of the evidence

No verified programme schedule, audience measurement or staff record for ALT TV is available in the sources consulted, and this profile therefore makes no claims about specific shows, presenters, broadcast hours or ratings. General accounts of Armenian regional television describe the typical output of such stations — local news, coverage of municipal and regional affairs, talk and community programming, supplemented under financial pressure by purchased content and repeats — but attributing that generic pattern to ALT TV in particular would go beyond the evidence, and it is presented here only as sector context, not as a description of ALT's own schedule. Similarly, no verified source establishes ALT TV's founding year, its ownership beyond its director's public role, or a confirmed closure date following the October–November 2016 analogue switch-off. Given the station's exclusion from digital licensing and its director's own framing of the choice as multiplex or closure, its terrestrial position after 2016 was evidently precarious, but the precise end of its broadcasting is not documented in the sources used here and is not asserted.

Directory record

For the WorldNM directory, ALT TV is recorded as a regional television channel of Armavir city, Armavir region, Armenia, directed by Khachik Danielyan, classified by the Media Initiatives Center among Armenia's early regional broadcasters, a signatory of the Armenian media Code of Ethics, a co-signatory of the regional channels' open letter of November 2013, and a public advocate in 2016 of allowing small regional channels to form their own regional multiplex. Its history illustrates both the contribution regional stations made to Armenian media pluralism and the cost that the country's digital transition imposed on them.