About Austria 9

Austria 9

Austria 9 was an Austrian private television channel that broadcast nationwide from Vienna between December 2007 and July 2012. It was a general-interest, or full-programme, service in the formal terms of its licence, built around family-friendly entertainment rather than news: Austrian and German films, Hollywood features and classics, American and German series and sitcoms, teleshopping, and magazine programmes drawn from all nine of Austria's federal states. The figure 9 in its name was, by the channel's own account, a reference to those nine states, and that federal idea shaped both its branding and part of its schedule. It broadcast from the Rosenhügel Studios in Vienna.

The channel's life was short, a little under five years, and it passed through three ownership phases: a launch consortium, a complete takeover by Conrad Heberling and the Andmann Media Holding in November 2009, and finally acquisition by ProSiebenSat.1 Media in 2012, which closed it and replaced it on the same capacity with sixx Austria. Its recorded audience was modest — around a 1 percent share among viewers aged 12 to 49 by 2011 — and that modest scale, in a small and highly competitive Austrian market dominated by ORF and by German channels, is the essential context for its history.

Licence and launch in December 2007

Austria 9 received its licence from the Austrian regulatory authority RTR on 6 December 2007, and it began broadcasting only six days later, at 12:12 on 12 December 2007. The precise midday start time was a deliberate piece of launch presentation for a date that was easy to remember. It entered the market as a nationwide private full programme, at a time when Austrian private television was still relatively young: nationwide private terrestrial television had only developed in the preceding years, and a new entrant had to build distribution on cable and satellite as much as on terrestrial transmission.

From the start the channel broadcast from the Rosenhügel Studios in Vienna, a historic film studio site that gave a new channel an established production address. Vienna was also the natural base for a service claiming to speak for all nine states while operating nationally. The batch research underlying this profile and the German-language reference record agree on the licence date, the launch date and time, and the Rosenhügel base, so those founding facts can be stated with confidence.

What the name promised: nine states, one channel

The channel's defining idea was contained in its name. Austria is a federal republic of nine states — Vienna, Lower Austria, Upper Austria, Styria, Tyrol, Carinthia, Salzburg, Burgenland and Vorarlberg — and Austria 9 presented itself as the channel of all nine. That was more than a slogan. Alongside its films and series, it carried magazine programmes from the states, with examples recorded in the reference literature including Ländle TV, Das Steiermark-Magazin and the Carinthian magazine Schau rein. For viewers outside Vienna, the promise was that regional life would appear on a national channel.

In practice, that regional strand was one part of a broader entertainment schedule rather than a news operation. The licence classified the service as a full programme, but, as the reference record notes explicitly, classic news programmes were not broadcast. Austria 9 therefore occupied an unusual position: it invoked the whole country in its identity, yet it left national news to ORF and to its private competitors, and competed instead on films, series, magazines and shopping.

Films, series and the weekly film nights

Entertainment was the core of the schedule. The channel showed Austrian feature films, German television films, Hollywood highlights and Hollywood classics, supplemented by series and sitcoms. Titles named in the sources include the American sitcom Will & Grace, The X-Files — in German, Akte X – Die unheimlichen Fälle des FBI — and reruns of the German series Der Bergdoktor. Teleshopping programmes were also a regular element, and they mattered commercially as well as editorially, because the channel was financed largely by television advertising and teleshopping.

Feature films were organised into branded evenings five nights a week. Mondays carried Austria 9 Movietime, devoted mainly to German films, often comedies and romantic comedies; Wednesdays were given to a Hollywood feature film; Thursdays returned to Movietime; Fridays featured an Austrian or European feature film; and Saturdays again carried a Hollywood film. That pattern shows the channel's method clearly: a predictable weekly rhythm of familiar film categories, designed for habitual viewing by a broad family audience rather than for event television or first-run premieres.

Ownership: from launch consortium to Heberling and Andmann

Austria 9 began under a mixed ownership structure. Contemporary trade reporting in 2008 described the owners as including Burda Broadcast Media, Andmann Media Holding, Dr Conrad Heberling, Medienpool TV GmbH and High View Holding. In November 2009 that structure was simplified decisively: the channel was taken over in its entirety by the two shareholders Conrad Heberling and the Andmann Media Holding. The German-language reference record describes the takeover in exactly those terms — a complete acquisition by those two shareholders.

The takeover did not change the channel's basic formula. It remained a family-friendly, Austrian-flavoured entertainment service funded mainly by advertising and teleshopping. Nor did it lift the channel beyond its modest audience position. By 2011 its market share stood at about 1 percent within the 12-to-49 target group. For a standalone national channel carrying the costs of nationwide distribution, that figure helps explain why the next ownership change, in 2012, was also its last.

Distribution and reach

Austria 9 was distributed by cable and satellite, and contemporary reports tracked its growing technical reach in its first year. In August 2008 the channel announced that it could reach more than 1.5 million cable households, an increase of 30 percent over the preceding three months, representing 56 percent of all cable connections in the country. It was also available direct-to-home by satellite as a free-to-air channel through the ORF smart card system, a common Austrian arrangement in which nominally free channels were tied to the national smart card.

Distribution widened further in 2009, when an agreement with Premiere, the pay-television platform of the period, made Austria 9 available to all Premiere satellite subscribers in Austria, extending its technical reach to a reported 3 million. Technical reach, however, is not the same as viewing. A channel can be available in most homes and still be watched by few of them, and Austria 9's roughly 1 percent share in its target demographic shows that availability never converted into a large habitual audience.

A channel without classic news

One of the clearest documented facts about Austria 9 is a negative one: despite its full-programme licence and its all-Austria branding, it did not broadcast classic news. Its information-adjacent output consisted of the state magazines rather than bulletins, journalism or current-affairs debate. That choice distinguished it from ORF's channels, from Puls 4 and from ATV, and it defined the limits of its public role.

The absence of news also reduced its costs and its risks. News is the most expensive and most politically exposed part of a general channel's schedule, and a small entertainment channel funded by advertising and shopping could reasonably choose to avoid it. The trade-off was visibility: without a news programme, a channel rarely becomes part of a country's daily public conversation, and Austria 9 remained, throughout its life, primarily a backdrop entertainment service rather than a reference point in Austrian public life.

The ProSiebenSat.1 takeover in 2012

In April 2012 it was announced that ProSiebenSat.1 Media AG had acquired Austria 9 and would reorient it as sixx Austria. Some launch reporting for the successor dates the completion of the purchase to March 2012 and its integration into the ProSiebenSat.1 Austria group from April; the consistent point across the sources is that the deal was completed in spring 2012 with the explicit purpose of building an Austrian offshoot of the German women's channel sixx on Austria 9's capacity.

For ProSiebenSat.1, the logic was portfolio logic. The group already operated Austrian versions of its German channels and owned Puls 4, and a dedicated women's entertainment channel filled a gap that a generalist minnow could not. Austria 9's nationwide capacity, its cable and satellite carriage and its 82 percent household reach — the figure later cited at the sixx Austria launch — were worth more to the group as a platform for sixx than the Austria 9 brand itself. The acquired channel was therefore not continued under its own identity.

Closure and replacement by sixx Austria

Austria 9 ended on 3 July 2012. Its programme was discontinued at 11:59 that morning, the channel logo was exchanged, and after a countdown the successor service began: sixx Austria launched at 20:15 that evening with the romantic comedy 27 Dresses. The handover was deliberately seamless in distribution terms — sixx Austria used Austria 9's existing capacity and was receivable in 82 percent of Austrian households from its first day, free-to-air by satellite across Europe and on Austrian cable.

The replacement also marked a change of address and strategy. Sixx Austria initially launched from the Rosenhügel Studios, as Austria 9 had broadcast from there, with the group's Austrian channels expected to move to the Media Quarter Marx at the end of 2012. Editorially the change was complete: the all-states generalist gave way to a targeted women's entertainment channel programmed in cooperation with sixx in Germany and Puls 4 in Austria.

Place in Austrian television history

Austria 9 matters less for any single programme than for what its biography shows about the Austrian market in the late 2000s. A nationally licensed private channel, launched with a clear federal branding idea and growing technical reach, could still not build an audience much beyond 1 percent in the key demographic, because it competed simultaneously with ORF's entrenched channels, with strong private rivals and with the full range of German-language channels from Germany that Austrian households had long received. Its financing model, resting largely on advertising and teleshopping, left little room to buy the exclusive content that might have changed that equation.

Its afterlife is its successor. The capacity, carriage agreements and household reach that Austria 9 assembled between 2007 and 2012 became the launch platform for sixx Austria, which continues as part of the ProSiebenSat.1 Austria portfolio. Read that way, Austria 9 was a transitional channel: it proved and packaged a nationwide private slot, and a larger group then put that slot to a more focused use.

What the record does and does not show

The verified record for Austria 9 is solid on structure and chronology: the RTR licence of 6 December 2007, the launch at 12:12 on 12 December 2007, the Rosenhügel base, the November 2009 Heberling and Andmann takeover, the programme mix and film-night pattern, the absence of classic news, the roughly 1 percent share among 12- to 49-year-olds, the spring 2012 ProSiebenSat.1 acquisition and the 3 July 2012 replacement by sixx Austria. Those facts are consistent across the batch research, the German and English reference entries and contemporary trade reporting.

What the available record does not provide, and what this profile therefore does not invent, is a detailed internal history: no reliable published figures for its annual revenues, staffing or programme budgets have been verified, and no authoritative account of the negotiations behind either takeover is available in the sources consulted. Where this profile is general — about market pressure and portfolio logic — it is drawing a careful inference from the documented audience figure and the documented outcome, and it presents that inference as context rather than as a reported fact.