Das Erste
Das Erste — The First — is the flagship national television channel of ARD, the association of German public broadcasting corporations. It is Germany's oldest television channel, launched on 25 December 1952, jointly operated by the nine regional public broadcasting corporations that make up ARD, and coordinated from Munich. It is not a British channel and has no headquarters in London: its home country is Germany, its language is German, and its famous 8 p.m. news, the Tagesschau, is produced in Hamburg. Its presence in the United Kingdom is a matter of satellite reception. Das Erste is available throughout Europe on free-to-air digital satellite television via Astra, principally at 19.2 degrees east, so British viewers equipped for that orbital position can watch Germany's first channel exactly as German viewers do.
In everyday German speech the channel is usually called Erstes Programm, the First Channel, or simply ARD. Its full name, Erstes Deutsches Fernsehen — First German Television — is still announced before major news editions, in the familiar formula that introduces the Tagesschau. Since 1996 the official brand has been Das Erste, and since 1984 its logo has been a stylised numeral 1. For more than seventy years it has been the shared national stage of Germany's federal broadcasting system: a single schedule to which every regional broadcaster contributes in proportion to the population it serves.
From NWDR experiments to a national service
The channel's first experimental broadcast was on 27 November 1950, as the television service of NWDR, the North-West German Broadcasting corporation, which in 1956 split into NDR and WDR. The regular NWDR television service started on Christmas Day, 25 December 1952, and nationwide transmission began on 1 November 1954 within the ARD framework, under the name Deutsches Fernsehen — German Television. Until ZDF began broadcasting in 1963 it was West Germany's only television channel.
The new service combined jointly produced programmes, such as the nightly Tagesschau, on the air since 26 December 1952, with programmes made individually by ARD member stations, coordinated by the programme directorate in Munich. It quickly acquired a reputation for tackling difficult subjects: in 1957 ARD launched Panorama, Germany's first political television magazine, which examined conflict-laden topics, scandals and taboos in post-war West German society, including former Nazis who had held important roles. ARD also operated a provisional second channel, ARD 2, from 1 June 1961 until ZDF took over the role of second network on 1 April 1963. Colour television was introduced on 25 August 1967, and since 1 September 1995 Das Erste has broadcast 24 hours a day.
Names, logos and the high-definition era
The channel was renamed Erstes Deutsches Fernsehen on 1 October 1984, with a new corporate design by Hans Bacher and a stylised number 1 logo that remains the basis of its identity. On 1 January 1997 the short brand Das Erste was adopted. A high-definition version, Das Erste HD, began in February 2010 with coverage of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. The HD service is broadcast via satellite in DVB-S2 on Astra 19.2 degrees east, on cable and IPTV across Germany and parts of Europe, and on digital terrestrial television in Germany in 1080p. Transmission via the Hot Bird satellite ended on 1 April 2017, concentrating its free European satellite presence on Astra.
A channel made by nine broadcasters
Das Erste is a joint production in the fullest sense. All nine of Germany's regional public broadcasting organisations contribute programmes to a common schedule, in shares roughly proportional to population. As of 2017 the largest contributor was WDR, serving North Rhine-Westphalia, with 21 per cent of broadcast hours, followed by SWR with 18.1 per cent, NDR with 17.5 per cent and BR, Bavaria's broadcaster, with 16.25 per cent. MDR contributed 10.6 per cent, HR 7.45 per cent, RBB 7.1 per cent, SR 1.25 per cent and Radio Bremen, the smallest member, 0.75 per cent. Deutsche Welle, Germany's international broadcaster, is the exception and does not contribute to the channel. This structure explains the channel's texture: a national news core from Hamburg, crime dramas produced in different German cities, regional magazines and entertainment made across the republic, all stitched into one schedule.
The Tagesschau and the 8 p.m. ritual
No programme defines Das Erste more than the Tagesschau. Produced by ARD-aktuell in Hamburg, it has been broadcast since 26 December 1952 and its main edition airs at 8 p.m. on Das Erste, simulcast on several ARD regional channels and on 3sat, Phoenix and ARD-alpha. The 8 p.m. chime and the announcement introducing the First German Television with the Tagesschau remain a national hallmark, and the bulletin attracts an average audience of around eight million viewers — a figure cited for its flagship edition in ARD references. The brand extends to the tagesschau.de website and the Tagesschau24 news channel. Around it sit the later Tagesthemen, with analysis and interviews since 1978, and the Nachtmagazin overnight. The bulletin has been interrupted only in the most exceptional circumstances: on 25 July 1988 a warning strike by the broadcasting union brought it to the brink of cancellation for the only time in its history, and Bavarian Television's Rundschau stood in as a substitute.
Drama, crime and the Tatort tradition
Fiction is the channel's other pillar. Its crime tradition is headed by Tatort, the Sunday-evening crime drama produced in rotation by the regional broadcasters, each with its own city and detective team, and by Polizeiruf 110, which began in East Germany and survived reunification. Long-running series include the Hamburg police drama Großstadtrevier since 1986, the hospital soap In aller Freundschaft since 1998, and the daily soaps Rote Rosen since 2006 and Sturm der Liebe since 2005. Lindenstraße, Germany's first weekly soap, ran from 1985 to 2020. Prestige productions such as Babylon Berlin and Charité have carried the channel's drama reputation abroad, while children's institutions such as Die Sendung mit der Maus and Sesamstraße, the German Sesame Street, have served generations of young viewers.
Sport, entertainment and current affairs
Sport has been part of the channel since Germany's 1954 World Cup victory in Bern, an early television landmark, and the Sportschau, on Saturdays with Bundesliga coverage since 1961, remains a fixture; the channel shares coverage of the FIFA World Cup and the UEFA European Championship across decades of tournaments. Entertainment ranges from quiz formats such as Gefragt – Gejagt, the German version of The Chase, and Quizduell, to political satire in extra 3 and long-running talk shows including Hart aber fair and Maischberger. Its current affairs magazines — Monitor since 1965, Kontraste since 1968, Report since 1960 and Weltspiegel, the foreign reports programme, since 1963 — give the regional broadcasters a national platform for investigative journalism, alongside the morning and midday magazines produced jointly with ZDF in many periods.
Watching across a divided Germany, and after reunification
Before 1990 Das Erste was distributed only in West Germany, mainly through transmitters owned by the Deutsche Bundespost, but the signals were powerful enough to be received freely across much of East Germany, where its newscasts were often more popular than those of the state broadcaster, Deutscher Fernsehfunk. The exceptions — the Dresden valley and the area around Rügen island — became a joke summarised in a nickname for ARD: Außer Rügen und Dresden, except Rügen and Dresden. On 15 December 1990, following reunification, ARD programming was distributed through the former East German transmitter network for the first time. Between 2002 and 2008 transmission in Germany was converted from analogue PAL to digital DVB-T. Historical audience shares underline its former dominance and its adaptation to competition: its annual average share was 30.8 per cent in 1990, still 14.8 per cent in 1996, and around 13 to 14 per cent through much of the 2000s.
Reception in the United Kingdom and sister services
In the United Kingdom, Das Erste is received as a free-to-air satellite channel. It is available throughout Europe via Astra, and British viewers use a dish aimed at 19.2 degrees east — separate from the 28.2 degrees east position of Sky and Freesat — with a generic digital receiver; no subscription or German address is needed for the satellite signal, while its official live stream is restricted to Germany. ARD's wider family includes the digital channels One, Tagesschau24 and ARD-alpha and joint ventures including Arte, 3sat, KiKA and Phoenix, several of which share the same satellite neighbourhood. In March 2026 ARD and ZDF announced a reform under which ARD's digital channels would be discontinued in favour of joint ventures. None of that changes the position of the flagship: more than seventy years after a Christmas Day launch in a divided country, Das Erste remains Germany's first channel — and, by satellite, a daily window on Germany for viewers in Britain.
