About 5th Channel

5th Channel

5th Channel, also known as 5 TV, Channel 5 and in Armenian as Hing Alik, is a private television channel based in Yerevan, Armenia, broadcasting in Armenian. It is one of the metropolitan channels of Armenia's state digital multiplex and a participant in the industry's audience measurement system. In the Caucasus Barometer 2024 trust survey, 4 per cent of respondents named it as their most trusted television station — the highest figure recorded in that survey for a channel outside Armenia's big national networks. In December 2025 its director, Harutyun Harutyunyan, publicly offered airtime to the closing Shoghakat TV for spiritual and cultural programming. The public record on 5th Channel is thinner than for Armenia's largest channels: no reliable published founding history, ownership register entry or ratings series was found in the sources used for this profile, and this profile states those limits openly rather than filling them with unverified detail.

Identity and Position in the Multiplex

5th Channel is headquartered in Yerevan and broadcasts in Armenian. It is counted among Armenia's multiplex channels: in the arrangements documented by the Media Ownership Monitor for the industry's measurement system, the Fifth Channel appears in the group of thirteen multiplex broadcasters that participate in the Industrial Committee established after the 2024 reform of audience measurement. Within that committee's fee structure, the Fifth Channel pays the reduced monthly membership fee of 50,000 Armenian drams, in the group that also includes Shoghakat, Mir, Nur, 21TV, Boon, A TV and H1 News, while the five board-member channels — H1, Armenia TV, Shant TV, Fast Sport and Kentron — pay the higher fee. That documented detail places 5th Channel precisely in the system's second tier: a recognised multiplex broadcaster, but not one of the five channels around which the measurement industry is governed.

Name, Website and Earlier TV 5 Companies

The channel's official website is 5tv.am. It should not be confused with the French-language TV5Monde, which is also distributed in Armenia by cable operators, nor with the historical TV 5 company that appears in Armenian licensing disputes of the early 2000s. An earlier company named TV 5, owned by TV 5 CJSC and recorded in media ownership investigations of around 2010 as the property of the Cafesjian and Sargsyan families — the founding shareholders of Armenia TV — took part in litigation against the National Commission on Television and Radio in 2003 alongside Dar 21, Armenakob, Yerevan and EV TV companies. Whether the present 5th Channel is the corporate continuation of that earlier TV 5 is not established in the open sources consulted for this profile, and the two are therefore not treated here as the same documented entity.

News Identity and the 2020 YouTube Incident

The best-documented episode in the channel's recent history concerns its online news presence during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war. Freedom House's Freedom on the Net 2022 report for Armenia records that in October 2020 the YouTube channel of 5th Channel TV, described there as an Armenian news outlet, was taken down following mass reporting by users from Azerbaijan and Turkey during the conflict, according to the channel's editor, Harutyun Harutyunyan. CyberHUB-AM, a digital security organisation, reported helping several journalists and outlets whose social accounts were suspended under similar circumstances in the same period.

The episode is significant for two verifiable reasons. It confirms that by 2020 the channel operated an active news service with a substantial enough online presence to be targeted in wartime information operations, and it names Harutyun Harutyunyan in an editorial leadership role at the channel in 2020 — the same person who appears in December 2025 as the channel's director. Armenian reporting also shows the channel's news crews working as a general news organisation: a January 2024 fact-checking investigation by Media.am, for example, drew on reportage prepared by 5th Channel in tracing how museum interviews filmed in Armenia were misused by an Azerbaijani channel.

Audience Trust

The firmest audience evidence for 5th Channel comes from the Caucasus Barometer 2024, the regional survey whose television trust question is used across this directory's Armenian profiles. In that survey, 4 per cent of respondents in Armenia named 5th Channel as the television station they trusted most for political news. For comparison within the same survey framework, smaller channels such as Free News TV and New Armenia TV were each named by 1 per cent, while the leading national networks took the largest shares. A 4 per cent most-trusted figure does not make 5th Channel a mass-audience leader — no ratings series placing it among the top five channels was found — but it does show a measurable, named trust base for its news, larger than that of any other second-tier Yerevan channel in the survey.

A News-Led Second-Tier Channel

That pattern — modest reach, disproportionate trust recognition — is consistent with the channel's documented public behaviour: a news-led identity, an active online video presence and a director willing to intervene publicly in industry questions, as in the Shoghakat offer described below.

The Shoghakat Offer of December 2025

On 26 December 2025, PanARMENIAN.Net reported that 5 TV Channel had expressed readiness to allocate airtime to Shoghakat TV for spiritual and cultural programming. The announcement was made by the channel's director, Harutyun Harutyunyan, who said that, as a proposal and public statement, the 5th Channel was ready to provide airtime to Shoghakat for spiritual and cultural broadcasts. The offer responded to the government decision, taken at the cabinet session of 25 December 2025, to dissolve the Spiritual-Cultural Public Television company that operated Shoghakat, with the changes taking effect from 1 January 2026. Yerkir Media made a similar offer of airtime to Shoghakat in the same days.

The episode documents 5th Channel acting as an established member of the Yerevan broadcasting community: a private channel with spare capacity and a public profile, positioning itself in a debate about the future of spiritual and cultural broadcasting after the closure of the church-linked public channel. It is also the most recent dated, sourced fact in the channel's public record at the time of writing, and it confirms the channel was operating normally at the end of 2025.

Programming

What can be verified about 5th Channel's programming is general rather than schedule-specific. It broadcasts in Armenian from Yerevan; it operates a news service whose output is cited by other Armenian media and fact-checkers; its wartime YouTube presence identifies it as a news outlet; and its director's December 2025 statement offered its airtime for spiritual and cultural broadcasts, implying a general schedule into which such programming could be placed. No reliable published programme grid, flagship show list or presenter roster was found in the sources consulted, and this profile does not invent one. Armenian television guides list the channel among the country's private stations available in the multiplex and through cable and online distribution.

Ownership and Corporate Record: What Is Not Known

For Armenia's larger channels, independent monitoring publishes shareholders, percentages and governance rules. For 5th Channel, no equivalent entry was found in the Media Ownership Monitor or in the other sources used here: the channel's owners, founding date and founding circumstances are not documented in the accessible public record consulted for this profile. Older investigations document a TV 5 company within the Cafesjian-Sargsyan orbit in the 2000s, as noted above, but do not establish continuity with the present channel. Researchers should treat any unsourced claim about 5th Channel's ownership or founding year with caution.

This openness about limits follows the standard applied across this directory: where the record is thin, the profile says so. The absence of published ownership data is itself a finding about transparency in the Armenian market, where the Media Ownership Monitor and similar projects have repeatedly noted that ownership information for smaller broadcasters is difficult to obtain and that some companies do not respond to inquiries.

Place in Armenian Media

5th Channel's verified significance rests on three documented facts. It is a multiplex broadcaster inside the formal structure of Armenian digital television, participating in the industry's post-2024 measurement system. It holds a measurable position in national trust research — 4 per cent naming it most trusted in the Caucasus Barometer 2024 — ahead of every other channel outside the leading group. And through its director it played a visible part in the industry's response to the closure of Shoghakat TV at the end of 2025. For a channel of its size, that is a real, if modest, public footprint.

Headquartered in Yerevan and broadcasting in Armenian through the state multiplex, cable and its website at 5tv.am, 5th Channel is best understood as one of the second-tier capital channels that give Armenian television its depth beyond the big networks: not a ratings leader on any published evidence, but a recognised news presence whose trust figures and public interventions are documented even where its corporate history is not.