About AzTV

AzTV

AzTV, or Azerbaijan Television, is the state flagship television channel of Azerbaijan and the oldest television station in the country. It first broadcast from Baku on 14 February 1956, when Azerbaijan was still the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic within the Soviet Union, and it has remained the central state channel through the Soviet decades, the restoration of independence in 1991 and the digital era. The channel is operated by the Azerbaijan Television and Radio Broadcasting Closed Joint-Stock Company, a company wholly owned by the state, and broadcasts from Baku in Azerbaijani to a nationwide audience and to viewers abroad. Its schedule combines news, talk shows, documentaries, music programmes, television drama and feature films, and it functions in practice as the televised voice of the Azerbaijani state, carrying official information, coverage of the president, government and parliament, and programming intended to serve state and public interests under its company charter.

Origins and the first broadcast in 1956

Television came to Azerbaijan thirty years after radio. Azerbaijan Radio had begun on 6 November 1926, and construction of the Baku television centre began in 1954 at Mehdi Huseyn 1, on one of the highest points in the capital. Azerbaijani builders and specialists constructed and equipped the centre together with colleagues from Moscow and Leningrad, and the building was handed over at the end of 1955. Test programmes from the Baku studio were broadcast occasionally until the regular service began. On 14 February 1956 the young actress Najiba Malikova appeared on screen, opened with the words Göstərir Bakı, meaning This is Baku, congratulated viewers on the start of television, and the feature film Bəxtiyar was shown that day. The channel was known in its early years as the Baku Television Studio, a name it kept until 1968, and much later, between 1996 and 2005, the main service was styled AzTV 1 alongside a second channel, AzTV 2, which operated from 1992 to 2005.

Growth of the Soviet-era service

The early Baku studio was an improvisation. It first aired a two-hour programme twice a week, then three days a week, staffed not by trained television specialists, who did not yet exist in the republic, but by people drawn from radio, newspapers and the theatre. Programming was decided day by day and consisted largely of concerts of classical and popular music, feature films, theatre performances, interviews on socio-political subjects, speeches by labour pioneers and a short news bulletin of about fifteen minutes read from the newspapers. From August 1956 the studio broadcast five days a week and the daily volume rose to two hours and twenty minutes. By 1962 daily output had reached seven hours, in the 1970s it rose to ten hours a day, and in the 1980s to eighteen hours a day. The station switched to videotape recording in 1965 as the technology became affordable, and its earliest recorded programmes from 1956, preserved on film, form the start of an archive that the broadcaster says it has maintained continuously to the present across film and videotape formats.

War, censorship and the end of the Soviet period

The final Soviet years placed the channel at the centre of a national crisis. During the events of January 1990 in Baku, when Soviet forces intervened and 138 civilians were killed according to the account carried in reference histories of the channel, announcer Rafig Huseynov appeared on air in a black suit and without a tie to express condolences to the people of Azerbaijan. For a period the television service operated under the control of the Soviet Army, and only material passed by military censorship was broadcast. That situation lasted until September 1991. After the failed coup attempt in Moscow, the dissolution of the Soviet Union became unstoppable, and on 18 October 1991 Azerbaijan declared the restoration of its independence. With that act Azerbaijan Television ceased to be a provincial Soviet channel and became the main television service of an independent state, a transformation that shaped its institutional identity for the next three decades: a state broadcaster whose first duty, in its own charter language, is to the state that owns it.

Reorganisation as a state closed joint-stock company

The present operating company dates from 2005. The Azerbaijan Television and Radio Broadcasting Closed Joint-Stock Company was established from the former state television and radio company by Presidential Decree No. 213 of 23 March 2005, with its charter approved later that year, and the national government is its only shareholder. The company operates three television channels, AzTV itself, İdman TV for sport and Mədəniyyət TV for culture, together with two radio services, Azerbaijan Radio and International Radio, also branded Voice of Azerbaijan, which reports broadcasting in twelve languages. The president appoints the company's chairman and deputy chairmen. Rovshan Mammadov became deputy chairman in January 2019 and chairman in September 2019. The State Media Monitor classifies the broadcaster as state-controlled: its charter directs it to produce material serving state and public interests, broadcast official state information and cover events and speeches by state and political officials, and its funding comes from the state budget, with published allocations recorded in recent monitoring.

Programming and editorial character

AzTV begins its broadcasting day with the national anthem of Azerbaijan. Its programming consists primarily of news, talk shows, documentaries, music shows and feature films, supplemented by autobiographical programmes, travel programmes and television plays. Academic surveys of Azerbaijani channels describe a large audience reach and a varied mix of talk shows, music and entertainment, documentaries, feature films and travel programmes carried to the most remote parts of the country and to many countries abroad in high definition. News and official coverage sit at the centre of the offer: the channel reports the activities of the head of state, the government and state bodies in detail, and its current-affairs programmes discuss domestic policy, foreign relations and social questions from a position aligned with the state. International observers, including OSCE election monitors cited in media monitoring, have consistently noted the dominance of incumbent and government coverage in Azerbaijani television news, and AzTV, as the state channel, is the clearest expression of that pattern rather than an exception to it.

Coverage, technology and the move to round-the-clock broadcasting

AzTV has long claimed the widest reach of any Azerbaijani channel. Reference data from March 2014 put the share of the population able to receive AzTV by terrestrial, cable or satellite broadcasting at 99.96 percent, the largest coverage area of any television channel in the country, in a market where the overall television penetration rate was recorded at 99 percent in 2014. The channel moved to twenty-four-hour continuous broadcasting in January 2005. Its programmes have also been carried by satellite for international audiences, with Azerbaijani reporting noting distribution in countries including Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, Iran, Canada, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Azerbaijan completed its analogue switch-off in stages in late 2016, with analogue broadcasting discontinued nationwide on 20 December 2016, and AzTV made the transition to digital terrestrial broadcasting alongside the other national channels. From early 2022 the main national channels, AzTV among them, were being broadcast from satellite in HD format, completing the channel's migration from the black-and-white studio pictures of 1956 to high-definition digital distribution.

The European Broadcasting Union question

AzTV's relationship with European broadcasting institutions illustrates its status. The channel expressed interest in participating in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2007, but it was not an active member of the European Broadcasting Union, and on 18 June 2007 its application for active EBU membership was denied because the channel was considered too closely connected to the Azerbaijani government. Weeks later, on 5 July 2007, the public broadcaster İctimai Television was admitted as a full EBU member instead, and it was İctimai, not AzTV, that took Azerbaijan into Eurovision from 2008 and hosted the contest in Baku in 2012 after Azerbaijan's 2011 victory. The episode is a useful distinction for directory readers: AzTV is the state channel, owned directly by the government through its closed joint-stock company, while İctimai is the separate statutory public broadcaster. The two are often confused outside Azerbaijan, but they are different institutions with different legal foundations, different funding arrangements and different international affiliations.

Archive and institutional memory

Few Azerbaijani media institutions can match AzTV's archival depth. The broadcaster maintains a large archive of its recorded programming from 1956 to the present, beginning with shows recorded on film in its first year and continuing through the videotape era that began in 1965 and into digital production. That archive gives the channel a role beyond daily broadcasting: it is the principal surviving moving-image record of Soviet and post-Soviet Azerbaijan, holding decades of concerts, theatre performances, official ceremonies, news film and drama. The company also presents its history as a national story, describing Azerbaijani television as a mirror of the people and an encyclopaedia for future generations, language that reflects how closely the institution identifies itself with the state and the nation it serves. Researchers should nonetheless treat the archive's custodianship and the channel's historical programming as products of a state institution, authoritative for official events and performances, and best read alongside other sources for contested political history.

Place in the Azerbaijani television system

Azerbaijan's television system, as documented by the European Journalism Centre's Media Landscapes guide and academic surveys, consists of the three AzTV-company state channels, one public channel, İctimai, and a group of privately owned national channels including Space TV, ATV, ARB and Xəzər TV, alongside regional and satellite services, some forty-seven channels in total in the commonly cited count. Within that system AzTV is both the oldest and the most institutionally senior service: the channel from which Azerbaijani television began, the carrier of official information, and the parent brand of the state sport and culture channels. Media Landscapes notes that all Azerbaijan-based channels have ties to the government and that national channels give full coverage to the activities and views of the authorities, a context in which AzTV's state ownership is a matter of formal structure rather than hidden influence. Its audience position has nevertheless faced competition since the 2000s from entertainment-led private channels, which at times have out-rated it with series and popular formats.

Assessment and current status

AzTV remains in active operation as Azerbaijan's state flagship channel, broadcasting from Baku in Azerbaijani, nationwide and internationally, in high definition and around the clock. Its strengths are longevity, reach, a deep programme archive and an unrivalled position as the official televised record of the Azerbaijani state. Its limits are those documented by international monitors: direct state ownership, presidential appointment of its leadership, a charter that mandates service to state interests, and news coverage that observers find heavily weighted toward the incumbent authorities. No independently audited audience figure for the channel is published in the sources consulted for this profile, and claims about its viewing share should be treated with caution. For a directory reader the essential facts are its launch on 14 February 1956 as the country's first television station, its operation by the state Azerbaijan Television and Radio Broadcasting CJSC alongside İdman TV and Mədəniyyət TV, its general entertainment, news, drama and documentary schedule, and its continuing role as the principal state channel of Azerbaijan.