About IRIB Fars TV

IRIB Fars TV

IRIB Fars TV is the provincial television channel of Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) for Fars province in southwestern Iran. Based in Shiraz, the provincial capital, the channel is listed among IRIB's regional channels and broadcasts local news, culture and community programming in Persian for the people of Fars. It serves the province that gave the Persian language its modern name — Farsi derives from Fars, the historic Pars from which the word Persia itself comes — and whose capital, Shiraz, is revered across Iran as the city of poets, gardens, roses and nightingales.

Few provincial channels carry a cultural inheritance as deep as this one. Within Fars stand Persepolis and Pasargadae, the ceremonial capitals of the Achaemenid Empire; within Shiraz stand the tombs of Hafez and Saadi, the two most beloved poets in the Persian language. Fars TV's daily work — provincial news, administration, agriculture, industry and community life — unfolds in a province that Iranians regard as a heartland of their identity, and its cultural programming speaks to audiences far beyond the province's borders.

Overview

Fars TV appears in IRIB's official listings among the corporation's regional channels, and directories of Iranian television identify it as the provincial service for Fars, owned within the state broadcasting system and based in Shiraz. It is one of the southern members of IRIB's provincial family, alongside services such as Khalije Fars TV for neighbouring Hormozgan and Khuzestan TV to the west. The channel's existence follows the organising principle of the network: every province of Iran has its own IRIB television channel, produced in its capital and devoted to its own affairs.

The channel's remit covers provincial news, local government, culture and community programming in Persian for Fars audiences. In practice that means the decisions of the provincial administration in Shiraz, the life of the province's cities, towns and farming districts, its universities and hospitals, its shrines and gardens, and the agricultural and industrial economy of one of Iran's larger provinces — all reported by a service based in the province and addressed to its people.

Ownership and Place Within IRIB

Fars TV is owned and operated by Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, the state-controlled corporation holding the monopoly of domestic radio and television services in Iran. IRIB, known as National Iranian Radio and Television until the revolution of 1979, is one of the largest media organisations in the Asia-Pacific region, with around 13,000 employees; its head is appointed directly by the Supreme Leader of Iran, and its functioning is governed by Article 175 of the constitution, with supervision by a council representing the president, the judiciary and the parliament.

IRIB's television portfolio comprises national general and specialist channels, international services in languages including English, Arabic and Spanish, and a network of around 30 provincial channels. About half of the provincial channels broadcast in minority languages such as Azerbaijani and Kurdish; Fars TV belongs to the Persian-language group, which reflects the linguistic character of its province. The channel is produced through IRIB's Fars centre in Shiraz, the broadcaster's provincial organisation, and forms the television arm of the state broadcaster's presence in Fars.

Shiraz: The Channel's Home City

Shiraz lies on a green plain at the foot of the mountains in southwestern Iran, roughly 200 kilometres inland from the Persian Gulf. References to the city reach back to Elamite tablets of around 2000 BC, and it rose to special prominence after the advent of Islam, becoming by the thirteenth century one of the largest and most popular cities of the Islamic world. It later served as capital of Iran under the Zand dynasty in the eighteenth century, which left the city the Arg-e Karimkhani citadel and the Vakil complex of mosque, bazaar and bathhouse.

Above all, Shiraz is the city of poets. It is the birthplace and resting place of Hafez, the master of Persian lyric poetry, whose tomb in its garden pavilion draws visitors from across Iran, and of Saadi, author of the Gulistan and the Bustan, whose mausoleum is likewise a place of pilgrimage for lovers of Persian literature. The city is called the city of roses and nightingales for its celebrated gardens, among them Eram Garden, one of the UNESCO-listed Persian gardens, and the Narenjestan garden. The Shah Cheragh shrine, with its mirrored interior, is a major centre of devotion. A provincial channel working in Shiraz has this entire world — poetry, gardens, shrines and bazaars — as the natural material of its cultural output.

Fars Province: The Achaemenid Heartland

The province beyond Shiraz contains the foundational sites of ancient Persia. Pasargadae, the first capital of the Achaemenid Empire and the tomb of Cyrus the Great, and Persepolis, the ceremonial capital built by Darius I and Xerxes some 2,500 years ago, both stand in Fars and both are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, as is the Sassanid Archaeological Landscape of Fars province, a group of sites from the empire that succeeded them. The province's very name is the origin of the words Persia and Farsi: ancient Pars was the homeland of the Persians, and the language of the country takes its name from this province.

Modern Fars is also a working agricultural and industrial province, producing crops in its fertile plains and hosting industry in and around Shiraz, with a population drawn predominantly from Persian communities alongside Turkic and other groups who together formed the region's culture over centuries. For Fars TV, the editorial territory therefore spans an extraordinary range, from Achaemenid ruins to contemporary farming and factory life, all within a single province.

Language and Audience

Fars TV broadcasts in Persian. Fars is a Persian-speaking province — the Shirazi accent is one of the recognised regional voices of the language — and the channel's audience shares the national language without the bilingual dimension that defines the provincial channels of the Azerbaijani- and Kurdish-speaking northwest. Instead, the channel's distinctiveness is cultural: it broadcasts from the province in which the Persian language is rooted, to an audience for whom Persian literature is a local inheritance as much as a national one.

The audience includes the metropolitan population of Shiraz, the residents of the province's other towns and rural districts, and the large number of Iranians elsewhere who follow Shiraz's culture and visit its shrines, gardens and ancient sites. Programming about Hafez and Saadi, about Persepolis or about the province's gardens inevitably reaches beyond Fars, because these are subjects of national devotion; in that sense Fars TV serves both a provincial audience and, on cultural themes, the whole Persian-speaking world.

Programming

Consistent with IRIB's provincial model, Fars TV's programming is built on local news, culture and community coverage. Its news service reports the provincial government and municipalities, the universities and medical centres of Shiraz, agriculture across the province's plains, industry, roads and the environment, and the social affairs of towns and villages. This is the information layer of provincial life that national channels cannot supply, delivered by journalists who work in the province.

Cultural programming is the channel's natural strength. The tombs and gardens of Shiraz, the poetry of Hafez and Saadi, the craft traditions of the province — including khatam marquetry, for which Shiraz has received a UNESCO seal of excellence, wood carving, metal engraving and seven-colour tilework — and the great archaeological sites of Persepolis, Pasargadae and the Sassanid landscape provide material of national significance. Religious programming has a major local focus in the Shah Cheragh shrine, one of the most important pilgrimage sites in southern Iran. Community coverage of festivals, commemorations and local events completes a schedule whose centre of gravity is unmistakably Fars.

Role in Provincial Public Life

Within Fars, the channel is a central institution of public life. It is where provincial officials address the population, where the province's universities, hospitals and industries are reported on, and where its people see their own celebrations, mourning ceremonies and civic occasions reflected on television. For a province of Fars's size and self-confidence, the dedicated channel is the natural home of provincial identity in broadcast form, distinct from the Tehran-centred national networks.

The channel also performs a work of cultural transmission. Shiraz's poetic and artistic traditions are living practices, sustained by visitation to the poets' tombs, by craft workshops and by the city's schools and universities. By documenting and broadcasting that culture, Fars TV helps carry it to younger generations in the province and presents it to the wider country, reinforcing Shiraz's standing as Iran's literary capital.

Access and Distribution

Fars TV reaches its audience through IRIB's domestic distribution system, principally terrestrial digital broadcasting within Fars province, consistent with the DVB-T carriage of IRIB's channels throughout Iran, and through the broadcaster's satellite and online distribution, which makes provincial programming available to viewers in other provinces and to the Iranian diaspora. The channel is carried in media directories of Iran as an established part of the state broadcaster's television offering, linked from IRIB's channel portfolio.

Its identity across listings is stable and simple: Fars TV, the IRIB provincial channel for Fars, based in Shiraz. That consistent identification matters for a provincial network in which each channel is a permanent public institution of its province, recognised by its audience as the local service of the national broadcaster.

Significance

IRIB Fars TV is the television voice of the province from which Persia takes its name. Its beat includes the tombs of the two greatest Persian poets, the ruins of the Achaemenid Empire and some of the most famous gardens in the Islamic world, alongside the ordinary news of a large modern province. As part of IRIB's network of around 30 provincial channels, it demonstrates the system's reach into Iran's historic heartlands: a channel made in Shiraz, in Persian, about Fars — and, because of what Fars means to Iran, of interest to the entire country. For the people of the province, it remains the first screen for their own news and culture.