About 5RTV

5RTV

5RTV is the public television channel of the Province of Santa Fe, Argentina, operated by Radio y Televisión Santafesina S.E., the state company created by Provincial Law 13.394 in December 2013. The channel was officially launched in September 2016. Its fantasy name, 5R, refers to the five regions into which the province's strategic planning divided Santa Fe, and which the channel exists to represent and connect. Its facilities were inaugurated in November 2015 at Recreo, on National Route 11 at kilometre 482, in a recovered building of the former Liceo Militar. 5RTV broadcasts general-interest public programming — news, culture, sport, festivals, production and regional life — through digital terrestrial television, cable operators and streaming, with its official website at 5rtv.com.ar. It is a channel of the provincial state, not of a provincial government of the day: its founding law designed its board with representation of the political forces in the provincial legislature and of its own workers.

5RTV's story is inseparable from a diagnosis made by Santa Fe's planners: that the province's inhabitants knew more about Buenos Aires than about each other. The channel was created as an instrument of provincial integration, intended to let santafesinos see their own towns, festivals, production and history on television.

The law: Radio y Televisión Santafesina, 2013

In 2010 Governor Hermes Binner sent the provincial legislature a project to create a system of provincial media. In December 2013 the legislature approved Law 13.394, creating Radio y Televisión Santafesina (RTS) Sociedad del Estado, under the framework of the national Audiovisual Communication Services Law 26.522, which authorised provincial states to hold one free-to-air television channel, one AM radio station and one FM station, plus repeaters. Provincial deputies' records note that the law was approved unanimously in the Senate and by an ample majority in Deputies, and RTS's own leadership highlighted that Santa Fe was the only province with such a law voted by all chambers and all parties with parliamentary representation.

The law defines RTS as a public service guaranteeing the rights of access to information, freedom of expression, culture, education and participation. It also sets content obligations unusual in their precision: RTS must broadcast at least sixty per cent local production daily, comprising a minimum of thirty per cent own production, including local news, and a minimum of thirty per cent independent local production by makers born in Santa Fe territory or resident there for at least two years, or made within the province. The remaining forty per cent may be co-production, own or independent production. Those quotas are the legal backbone of 5RTV's claim to be a genuinely provincial channel rather than a relay.

Governance: a channel of the state

Law 13.394 designed RTS's board to have seven directors: two proposed by the provincial Executive, two representing the Chamber of Senators, two representing the Chamber of Deputies, and one representing the workers of RTS, elected directly and democratically by them. Directors serve three-year terms and may be re-elected for one consecutive period. At the project's launch, the provincial government designated Daniel Canabal and Danilo Lujambio as the Executive's representatives, with Canabal as president of the board.

Governor Antonio Bonfatti emphasised the point at the inauguration of the facilities: 5R was not a channel of the government but of the state, with a board formed by directors designated by the political forces with parliamentary representation. That distinction — state ownership with plural governance, rather than direct government control — is the central institutional fact about 5RTV, and it follows the public-service principles that Law 13.394 wrote into its own text. Later political debate in Santa Fe about the channel's budgets and programming has taken place within that legal structure rather than by abolishing it.

The name 5R and the five regions

The channel's fantasy name was explained by RTS board president Daniel Canabal at the launch of its facilities. RTS is the name of the state company created by the law; 5R is the fantasy name, and it has to do with the five regions the channel intends to represent, the regions of which it wants to be mirror and reflection. The logo was therefore silver or white: white as the sum of all the colours of the regions, and silver as reflection. The name today is commonly written 5RTV, combining the 5R identity with its television function.

Behind the name stood a personal origin story that Canabal himself recounted: Hermes Binner, more than a decade before becoming governor, had travelled the province repeatedly and become conscious of how little santafesinos knew each other — that people were better informed about Berisso, La Matanza or Ensenada, in Buenos Aires Province, than about Gato Colorado or Rufino in their own province. Governor Bonfatti then took the RTS project as his own with the firm will to turn that diagnosis into a channel. The facilities inaugurated in 2015 were presented as the physical form of a provincial integration dream also expressed in roads, education and culture.

Facilities at Recreo

On 6 November 2015 Governor Bonfatti inaugurated the new installations of Radio y Televisión Santafesina at Recreo, at kilometre 482 of National Route 11. The investment was made entirely by the provincial government, in a four-year work that recovered a building that had been quite deteriorated, part of the former Liceo Militar of Recreo, thereby also recovering provincial architectural patrimony. At the inauguration the channel's managers stated the objective of being on air within three months, although the official launch in fact came in September 2016.

The Recreo location placed the provincial channel outside the city of Santa Fe proper, in the metropolitan area's northern corridor, on the national route that runs the length of the province. For a channel whose purpose is territorial integration, the choice of a recovered public building on the province's spinal road, rather than a leased studio in the capital, carried a deliberate symbolism that provincial speakers stressed at the inauguration.

Launch in September 2016 and carriage

5RTV was launched officially in September 2016. It could be tuned through the national digital terrestrial platform, the TDA, and through cable operators' grids, a process completed locality by locality, and by streaming on YouTube and on its official site, 5rtv.com.ar; at launch it had not yet been uploaded by the satellite operator DirecTV. Inclusion by local cable operators advanced slowly during 2016, after the provincial government provided, within a tax reform, exemption from Gross Income tax for operators that carried the signal.

Provincial reporting from the launch period lists the communities progressively reached through cooperatives and local companies in the centre-west of the province — among them San Vicente, Gálvez, María Juana, El Trébol and dozens of smaller towns. That pattern is characteristic of Santa Fe, where much cable television is provided by local cooperatives and small firms; a provincial public channel's real national work is done in hundreds of such carriage agreements. Officials presenting the channel framed its purpose as democratising communication and tightening bonds of proximity between the communities of each of the province's five regions, looking more at each other as santafesinos rather than always towards Buenos Aires.

Programming

RTS set out to broadcast general-interest programming across a wide thematic range: news, fiction, sport, music, humour, culture, cooking, production, tourism, life stories, entertainment, technology, trends and rights, and children's content, together with political analysis programmes, reflection of the daily activity of the provincial Executive and the legislative chambers, and news segments from the province's different cities. All of this content was to have a strong territorial imprint, reflecting the daily life, culture, customs and inhabitants of the five regions.

In practice, provincial reporting on the channel's later years notes that its clearest audience successes came with transmissions of sporting events and festivals — occasions when a provincial channel can show its whole territory something no national channel will carry — together with its news services. The statutory local-production quotas continue to frame its grid: at least sixty per cent local production, split between RTS's own production and independent Santa Fe production, is a legal obligation of the service, not merely an editorial preference.

5RTV and Santa Fe's television landscape

5RTV entered a provincial landscape already served by strong local commercial stations — Telefe Santa Fe and Telefe Rosario among them — and by university television in Litus TV. Its difference is constitutional rather than commercial: it is the province's own channel, created by a law approved across party lines, obliged by that law to carry provincial production, and governed by a board representing the legislature and its workers as well as the executive. Provincial commentary has noted that few Argentine provinces have state television stations at all, and that none before Santa Fe's was framed fully in the objectives of the 2009 national audiovisual law.

The channel has also been a subject of provincial politics, as public media usually are. Reporting at the change of provincial government in 2019 discussed its budget, its staff of around sixty people and versions of reduced programming that would keep only the most viable productions — sporting events, festivals and news. That debate is part of the channel's record, but it has been conducted around a channel whose existence rests on a provincial law rather than on a governor's decree, which is precisely the protection its founders designed.

Current status and significance

5RTV continues as the television service of Radio y Televisión Santafesina S.E., the Santa Fe state media company, broadcasting from Recreo to the province through digital terrestrial television, cable and streaming at 5rtv.com.ar. Its mandate remains that of Law 13.394: a public service of information, culture and education for Santa Fe society, with a majority of local production and a name that binds it to the province's five regions.

Its significance for Argentine media is that it is the fullest provincial application of the 2009 audiovisual law's public-media model: a state company created by a unanimously supported provincial law, a plural board, defined local-content quotas, recovered public facilities and a general-interest provincial channel launched in September 2016. Where many Argentine public channels grew informally around provincial governments, 5RTV was designed on paper first — in Law 13.394 of December 2013 — and the channel that resulted still carries that design in its name, its governance and its programming obligations.