About AUF1

AUF1

AUF1 — the name expands to Alternatives Unabhängiges Fernsehen, Kanal 1, meaning Alternative Independent Television, Channel 1 — is an Austrian online television service based in Linz, in Upper Austria. It was founded by Stefan Magnet, who is also its editor-in-chief, and it went online on 31 May 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic. It distributes its programmes principally through its own website, auf1.tv, and through social and messaging platforms, and it addresses a German-speaking audience in Austria, Germany and beyond. It holds no Austrian television licence. This profile describes the service factually and neutrally, from official, regulatory and press sources, including the classifications applied to it by German and Austrian authorities, which are attributed to those authorities wherever they appear.

AUF1's history since 2021 is principally a history of three things: rapid growth within the audience that formed around opposition to COVID-19 measures; repeated regulatory proceedings concerning its attempts to reach viewers through licensed television channels in Austria and Germany; and classification by the German domestic intelligence service, reported in the German constitutional protection report, as a confirmed right-wing extremist endeavour under observation. Each of those strands is documented below in the terms in which regulators, courts of record and established press sources have stated them.

Founding by Stefan Magnet and launch on 31 May 2021

AUF1 was founded by Stefan Magnet during the COVID-19 pandemic. On 31 May 2021 it went online for the first time with a contribution, broadcasting from Linz. Magnet is the service's owner figure, chief executive and editor-in-chief in the records consulted; the editor Elsa Mittmannsgruber is also named in the channel's masthead information. The service is based in Austria but addresses all German-speaking countries. Its self-description is contained in its name: alternative and independent, presenting its news programmes as information that, in its own framing, the mainstream deliberately withholds.

Press profiles of the founder record that Magnet, an advertising entrepreneur from Upper Austria, had a long history of activism in the Austrian far-right scene before founding the channel, including a managerial role in the Bund freier Jugend, described in the sources as a right-wing extremist youth organisation in Austria. The programme manager for Germany, Andreas Retschitzegger, is likewise recorded as a former member of that organisation's circle who was also active in the FPÖ youth organisation. Those biographical points are reported here as they are documented in the reference and press record, because they form part of the documented background of the service's leadership.

Format, distribution and audience development

AUF1 is an online service, not a licensed broadcast channel. Its programmes are published on its own website and promoted through social platforms; press reporting from its second year recorded about 223,000 followers on its Telegram channel, and by the end of 2022 the service was described in the reference record as one of the largest alternative media outlets of the COVID-sceptic and conspiracy-ideology milieu in the German-speaking countries. In the summer of 2022 it became known that AUF1 intended to establish a permanent editorial presence in Berlin, headed by Martin Müller-Mertens, previously the television head of the German magazine Compact, with the stated intention that the focus of reporting would increasingly shift to Germany; a Berlin office and a Berlin programme followed in the autumn of 2022.

The service styles itself a television station, and its programme takes the forms of television — news programmes, interviews, magazine and discussion formats — while being delivered as online video. That distinction, between television form and online distribution, is not pedantry: it determines the service's legal position, because Austrian broadcasting licences attach to broadcast distribution, and AUF1's regulatory history turns entirely on the moments when its online content crossed into licensed television carriage.

Programme content, as documented by monitors and press

AUF1's programme content is frequently classified in the sources as misinformation. The reference summary of the monitoring and press record states that the channel denies the danger of COVID-19 and presents matters in that context as a conspiracy of an unspecified elite; that, according to Magnet, actors including Google, the World Economic Forum and others are presented as working to destroy humanity; and that the service covers statements by politicians of the German AfD and reports on AfD party conventions, is sympathetic to the policies of Vladimir Putin and has justified the Russian invasion of Ukraine, promoting Russian propaganda narratives. Press reporting likewise records that the channel openly supports the AfD and the Austrian FPÖ, and that it was, together with the smaller Upper Austrian outlet RTV, among the first outlets to interview the FPÖ leader after his party's 2024 national election victory.

AUF1 and its founder reject characterisations of this kind; when media reported on antisemitic content promoted via AUF1 and its Telegram channel, Magnet accused UNESCO, the European Commission and the World Jewish Congress of conducting a defamation campaign. This profile records both the documented classifications and the service's rejection of criticism, and it adopts neither side's vocabulary as its own: the assessments above are attributed to the monitoring, reference and press sources that made them.

No Austrian licence: the KommAustria proceedings and RTV

AUF1 holds no Austrian television licence, and it has probably never submitted a licence application, in the reference record's assessment. In November 2022 the Austrian media authority KommAustria announced that it had initiated proceedings concerning AUF1 on suspicion of broadcasting without a licence. KommAustria wrote that content obviously designed by AUF1 was being broadcast as part of the terrestrial RTV programme in the Linz area; RTV is a local commercial Austrian television station, and AUF1 content had been carried within its programme for a period in 2022 without AUF1 holding a licence for that carriage.

Later German-language reporting on the proceedings records that KommAustria established a legal violation by the association behind AUF1 and that, at the end of 2024, administrative penalties were imposed on Stefan Magnet and on the RTV proprietor. The significance of the episode is structural: an unlicensed online service can publish freely on its own website, but the moment its programmes are transmitted as part of a licensed broadcaster's television service, broadcasting law applies to that transmission — and AUF1's Austrian television presence has only ever existed inside another station's licensed programme.

The German satellite episode: schwarz rot gold tv, 2023

In 2023 AUF1 obtained European satellite distribution by another route. From September 2023, a daily six-hour block of AUF1 programming was transmitted via Astra through schwarz rot gold tv, SRGT, a channel of a German company based in Baden-Württemberg which held a licence dating from 2021 and whose head is recorded as the Stuttgart physician and AfD sympathiser Wilfried Geissler. SRGT had concluded a contract with a company from the AUF1 network, under which SRGT transmitted the AUF1 programmes and received payment in return.

When the arrangement became known, the responsible state media authority for Baden-Württemberg, the LfK, prohibited further broadcasting via the Astra satellite with immediate effect on 14 November 2023, on the ground, as later summaries put it, of prohibited placement and of SRGT's lack of editorial control over the AUF1 content it transmitted. On 28 February 2024 a fine totalling 195,000 euros was imposed on SRGT for the unauthorised transmission of AUF1 programme content between September and November 2023, and SRGT thereafter ceased broadcasting and gave up its slot. The fine fell on the licensed German channel, not on AUF1 itself, a distinction this profile preserves because it is the legally operative one.

Official classifications and observation

The German-language reference record, citing the German constitutional protection report, describes AUF1 as classified as a confirmed right-wing extremist endeavour and monitored by the German domestic intelligence service. German-language explanatory sources summarise the position as follows: since 2024 the German domestic intelligence service has observed AUF1, and in its current report the channel is named as a confirmed right-wing extremist endeavour — in the German formula, a gesichert rechtsextremistische Bestrebung. The Baden-Württemberg state office for the protection of the constitution also observes the service's presence in that state, as the satellite proceedings record.

Austrian official assessments are recorded in similar terms in election-observation and press reporting: AUF1 has been labelled by Austrian domestic intelligence reporting as an alternative right-wing extremist media channel, and the Austrian Directorate for State Security and Intelligence, the DSN, is reported as regarding media projects of AUF1's kind as a hybrid and growing threat to public security in Europe, with a government report describing AUF1 as a leading media outlet in the German-speaking conspiracy sphere since the pandemic. Political reactions divide predictably: after reports of German intelligence observation of the Austrian service, the FPÖ's media spokesman protested against the observation as foreign interference in Austrian journalism. All of these positions are reported here as the documented positions of the bodies that hold them.

Presence in Austrian public life

Despite holding no licence, AUF1 has attained a recognised place in Austrian political media. In the autumn of 2024, the Austrian Parliament's directorate decided to allow AUF1 to broadcast from the Parliament's media centre at the 2024 National Council election, reasoning, in the recorded justification, that a broad interpretation of what constitutes a medium was possible; the federal office for sect affairs criticised that decision. The episode captures the service's ambiguous status — treated in practice as a news medium by a state institution, classified by security authorities, and unlicensed as a broadcaster — more completely than any single label.

The service has also built a cooperation network among like-minded outlets: the reference record notes a cooperation since April 2022 with the internet channel eingeschenkt.tv and since September 2022 with the Swiss alternative health channel QS24, itself noted for disinformation. Its Berlin expansion, its AfD and FPÖ coverage and its presence at party events give it a cross-border German-speaking role that its Linz base and online-only distribution would not, at first sight, suggest.

Funding and operations, so far as documented

AUF1 presents itself as financed by its audience, and press and explanatory reporting records a continuing practical difficulty: the repeated closure of its donation accounts, which Magnet has publicly lamented, with explanatory sources reporting closures reaching double figures and the service relying on an independent donations association to forward funds. No audited accounts, staff totals or revenue figures for AUF1 have been verified in the sources consulted for this profile, and none are stated; claims about large undisclosed backers, which appear in critical commentary, are likewise unverified and are not adopted here.

What can be stated operationally is the service's continuity: founded in May 2021, it has published continuously since, expanded to a Berlin editorial presence in 2022, achieved temporary satellite carriage in 2023, covered the Austrian election of 2024 from the Parliament's media centre, and remains active at its website, auf1.tv, at the time this profile was researched. Its current status in the reference record is given as active.

Why AUF1 is included in a television directory

AUF1 belongs in a directory of Austrian television outlets with a caveat that this profile has maintained throughout: it is an online television service in form and self-description, not a licensed television channel. Its inclusion is justified by its documented impact on the Austrian television system — content carried on a licensed regional channel and investigated by KommAustria, a satellite arrangement that produced a prohibition and a 195,000-euro fine in Germany, accreditation in practice at the Austrian Parliament, and classification by two countries' security authorities. A directory that omitted it would fail to describe the Austrian media landscape as regulators and audiences actually encounter it.

Equally, a directory that described it as an ordinary licensed channel would misdescribe it. The correct record is the compound one: Alternatives Unabhängiges Fernsehen, Kanal 1; founded by Stefan Magnet in Linz; online since 31 May 2021; unlicensed; proceedings in Austria from 2022; satellite block in Germany from September to November 2023, stopped by the LfK; classified in the German constitutional protection reporting as a confirmed right-wing extremist endeavour under observation.

Sources, neutrality and limits

This profile is built from the German and English reference entries for AUF1, from the regulatory facts stated by KommAustria and the Baden-Württemberg media authority as reported in those entries and in German-language explanatory coverage, and from established press reporting, including the Media Diversity Institute's account of the service's launch, AFP reporting on far-right outlets in Austrian media carried internationally, and election-observation reporting on Austrian intelligence labelling. Classifications of the service's politics and content are attributed to those sources at each occurrence, and the service's and its political allies' objections are recorded where the sources record them.

The limits of the record are these: no primary financial or audience measurement for AUF1 is publicly verified; follower figures quoted in press profiles are dated snapshots; and legal proceedings connected with the service have continued to develop, with administrative penalties reported at the end of 2024 and intelligence reporting updated since. Readers should treat dates, proceedings and classifications in this profile as accurate to the sources consulted at the time of research, and check the live regulatory record for later developments.