About HT1

HT1

HT1 is a private regional television channel serving the Hausruckviertel and Innviertel districts of western Upper Austria. It is operated by HT1 Medien GmbH, based in Grieskirchen, postcode 4710, and it broadcasts regional reports and magazines for the districts of Grieskirchen, Braunau, Ried im Innkreis and Schaerding. Its slogan is HT1 — Das schau ich mir an!, HT1 — That's something I'll watch. HT1 is distributed by satellite via Astra as a programme window on LT1, by cable including Magenta, and by IPTV via A1, and it maintains a substantial presence beyond linear television through its website at ht1.at and social video channels. Regulatory documents published by RTR record the company's layered licensing history: an on-demand service registered in 2011, the cable programmes HT1 Innviertel and HT1 Hausruck, and a ten-year satellite television licence granted by KommAustria on 21 September 2016.

Of the small Upper Austrian channels in this batch, HT1 has one of the fullest current footprints. Its website publishes a continuous flow of recent regional video reports — apprenticeship summits, charity anniversaries, business and community stories from towns such as Natternbach and Grieskirchen — each credited to named editorial and camera staff and carrying the channel's office contact details. This profile draws on those primary materials, on the RTR and KommAustria documents, and on the German-language channel list, and it marks clearly where the public record still ends.

Coverage Area: The Hausruck and Innviertel Country

HT1's name encodes its original territory: the H stands for the Hausruckviertel, the quarter of Upper Austria centred on the Hausruck hill country, and its home town Grieskirchen is one of that quarter's district capitals. Its documented broadcast area extends well beyond a single district. The German-language channel list records HT1's territory as the districts of Grieskirchen, Braunau, Ried and Schaerding — a swathe of western Upper Austria running from the Hausruck hills to the Inn river and the Bavarian border, taking in the Innviertel towns of Braunau am Inn, Ried im Innkreis and Schaerding as well as the Grieskirchen area. This is a largely rural region of market towns, agriculture, manufacturing SMEs and cross-border links to Bavaria, whose everyday news is rarely the first concern of Linz-based or Vienna-based media.

HT1 addresses that region as its whole world. The reports visible on its own platform are hyper-local in the best sense: a Kiwanis club in the Grieskirchen-Hausruck district marking forty years of family support; an apprenticeship summit in Natternbach where thirty-one companies sought trainees; charity balls and company stories from Ried and the Innviertel. Each report is labelled with its places — Grieskirchen, Peuerbach, Tollet, Schluesslberg; Natternbach, Grieskirchen, Upper Austria — and credited to its makers, for example editorial work and editing by Tamara Zopf with camera by Thomas L. Jenner. This is the documented daily texture of the channel: named local journalists filming named local institutions.

Company and Management

The operator is HT1 Medien GmbH, company register number FN 179293t, of 4710 Grieskirchen. A 2026 regulatory document from RTR identifies the company's managing director in formal proceedings, and the channel's own published team pages name two managing directors with distinct portfolios: Christian Hoeckner, responsible for reach and cross-media, and Gerald Schlager, responsible for conception and production. The channel's office telephone and email are published on its site as +43 7248 61911 and office@ht1.at, with the two managing directors also publishing direct mobile contacts — a level of personal accessibility typical of regional media houses that sell trust as much as airtime.

Their published self-description explains HT1's business model in their own terms. Hoeckner's pitch to regional companies is that a reportage on HT1 presents a business authentically and approachably, building trust and customer loyalty through professionally produced features — behind-the-scenes insights, success stories and expert interviews. Schlager's is that people love moving images, and that HT1's broadcast possibilities across regional television, the website and social media channels let a company tell its story and find customers or employees. In other words, HT1 operates simultaneously as a regional newsroom and as the Hausruck and Innviertel's video production partner — the same dual model documented at its peers, stated here with unusual candour by the channel itself.

Licensing History: On-Demand, Cable and Satellite

HT1's regulatory trail, set out in an RTR decision, shows a broadcaster that formalised each new distribution path as it adopted it. The company was registered with KommAustria, on notification dated 10 January 2011, reference KOA 1.950/11-018, as provider of the on-demand service HT1, available at ht1.at. On notification dated 6 November 2012, reference KOA 1.950/12-056, it became provider of the cable television programme HT1 Innviertel, in addition to an earlier-notified cable programme, HT1 Hausruck — two sub-regional cable services matching the two halves of its territory. Then, by KommAustria decision of 21 September 2016, reference KOA 2.135/16-007, HT1 Medien GmbH received a licence to operate the satellite television programme HT1 for a duration of ten years.

That satellite licence is the key to the channel's current distribution. The German-language channel list records HT1's reception as satellite via Astra as a programme window on LT1 — HT1's programmes appear in a window within the satellite output of LT1, Upper Austria's flagship regional — plus cable networks including Magenta and IPTV via A1. The window arrangement is an efficient piece of regional cooperation: it gives a district broadcaster satellite reach it could not economically sustain alone, inside the transponder capacity of the province's largest regional channel. Alongside linear distribution, the RTR decision records HT1's social channels: the YouTube channel HT1 — Das schau ich mir an!, with regional reports and features from the districts of Ried, Schaerding, Braunau, Grieskirchen and the rest of Upper Austria, recorded at 6,300 subscribers in the regulator's November 2025 screenshot, plus Instagram and TikTok presences. The same regulatory file also records, in a 2026 penalty notice, that the company's later social on-demand services were notified to KommAustria late, drawing modest sixty-euro fines per service — a minor, documented compliance episode that this profile records for completeness; it did not affect the channel's licences.

Programming and Editorial Character

HT1's programme, as documented by its own output, consists of regional reports and reportages from its four districts: community and charity life, education and apprenticeship themes, regional business, events and human-interest stories, published both in its broadcast windows and as individual videos on ht1.at and YouTube, where recent items appear at a steady, near-daily rhythm. The channel's materials also document its commercial formats for partners — reportage packages, spots and short advertising forms — but its public face is the regional report: a few minutes of professionally shot, edited and narrated coverage of something that happened in the Hausruck or the Innviertel and matters to the people there.

No audience ratings or reach figures for HT1 are published in the sources consulted, and the channel does not appear in the national TELETEST shares reported for 2024, where ORF 2, ORF 1 and ServusTV lead. HT1's measurable public footprint is instead its continuous production: a website archive of numbered reports running into the thousands of items, each with production credits, which testifies to a newsroom that has operated at production scale for years.

HT1 Among Upper Austria's Regional Channels

HT1 occupies the west of Upper Austria's dense regional map. East and south of it sit LT1 in Linz, its satellite-window host; LinzLand TV for the Linz-Land district; TV1 Oberoesterreich; WT1 in Wels; RTV in the Steyr area; Muehlviertel TV in the north; and dorf TV, the Linz community channel. HT1's four-district territory is one of the larger footprints among the district channels, and its combination of cable programmes, a satellite window, A1 IPTV carriage and a strong social-video operation makes it one of the most completely distributed. Its two historical cable brands, HT1 Hausruck and HT1 Innviertel, also preserve a distinction its audience recognises: the Hausruck and the Innviertel are separate quarters of the province with separate identities, and HT1 has always addressed them as such, under one roof in Grieskirchen.

Regional Television in Western Upper Austria

The need HT1 serves is structural. Western Upper Austria is far enough from Linz — and oriented enough towards Passau and Bavaria — that provincial media treat it as a periphery. Its district capitals are small; its news is municipal, agricultural and industrial at a scale national media ignore. Austria's licensing framework, created by the 2001 private television law and administered by KommAustria and RTR, exists precisely to let services like HT1 operate legally at this scale, and HT1's file — 2011 on-demand registration, 2012 cable expansion, 2016 satellite licence — is a model record of a small broadcaster using each tier of that framework in turn. The end of analogue broadcasting in 2011 and the growth of social video since have changed its distribution repeatedly; its answer, documented in its own materials, is cross-media: the same report works on television, on the website and on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.

How an HT1 Report Is Made

The production credits on HT1's own published reports offer a rare ground-level view of how a channel of this size works. A typical item — for example the October 2026 report on the Kiwanis Club Grieskirchen-Hausruckkreis, which has supported families in the region for forty years — is tagged with the places it covers, in that case Grieskirchen, Peuerbach, Tollet and Schluesslberg, and is credited line by line: editorial work by Tamara Zopf, camera by Thomas L. Jenner, editing by Tamara Zopf. A report on the apprenticeship summit in Natternbach, where thirty-one regional companies presented their training places to young people, carries the same credit pattern and a numbered production code. The reports are built around direct quotations from local participants — club members, employers, teachers — rather than studio presentation, and each ends with an invitation to follow the channel HT1 — Das schau ich mir an! on WhatsApp, alongside the office number and email. The picture that emerges is of a small, named, accountable local newsroom: the same few professionals report, film and cut the district's stories, and their names are on the work. That transparency is itself part of the channel's local contract with its audience, and it distinguishes HT1's documented output from the anonymous programme loops of some of its peers.

Assessment and Limits of the Record

On the verified evidence: HT1 is a Grieskirchen-based regional channel operated by HT1 Medien GmbH, managed by Christian Hoeckner and Gerald Schlager, serving the districts of Grieskirchen, Braunau, Ried and Schaerding with regional reports and magazines, distributed by Astra satellite as a programme window on LT1, by cable including Magenta and by A1 IPTV, with on-demand and social services registered with the regulator since 2011 and a ten-year satellite licence granted in September 2016. Its slogan is HT1 — Das schau ich mir an!, and its website demonstrates a currently active, credited, locally staffed production operation.

The limits are these: HT1's founding year and earliest history are not stated in the sources consulted — the regulatory record begins with its 2011 on-demand registration — and no audience, revenue or full programme-archive data is published. This profile therefore begins the documented story in 2011 rather than guessing an earlier launch. Within those limits, HT1 stands as one of the most fully documented and most actively publishing district broadcasters in Upper Austria: a two-quarter channel that turned a satellite window, a cable base and a social-video newsroom into a durable regional institution.