About Kurier TV

Kurier TV

Kurier TV is the television channel of the Austrian daily newspaper Kurier, operated by the Kurier media house in Vienna. It is a regional information channel for eastern Austria — Vienna, Lower Austria and Burgenland — carrying Kurier news, talks, magazines, documentaries and regional infotainment around the clock. Its present name dates only from 9 February 2023, but the channel's lineage is considerably older: it began as BKF, the Burgenland cable television service, in 1997, became the eastern-Austrian regional channel Schau TV in February 2012, and was taken over completely by the Kurier media house in August 2017 before being renamed for its parent newspaper six years later.

That lineage makes Kurier TV a revealing case of Austrian publisher television. A regional cable service created by an electricity utility passed to a Vienna publishing house, then to a national newspaper group that first ran it as a regional brand and finally folded it fully into the newspaper's cross-media identity, extending it to twenty-four hours and repositioning it as the moving-image arm of the Kurier newsroom. The channel today is based with its newsroom and studios in the Kurier media house in Vienna and is a member of the R9 network of Austria's nine leading regional channels.

Overview

Kurier TV describes its own focus as regional infotainment and quality journalism from Austria's eastern region. Its programme combines the Kurier news services produced from the newspaper's journalism, interview and talk formats, daily information and service magazines, documentaries and discussion programmes, with an evening appointment strand that, since the 2023 relaunch, includes a 20:15 talk and discussion slot. Broadcasting is in German, in high definition at 720p, and since February 2023 the channel has broadcast around the clock rather than in a limited regional loop.

At the moment of the renaming, the media house reported a technical reach of more than five million people in Austria and an average of more than 150,000 viewers a day. Those figures are the operator's own, published in its relaunch announcement, and should be read as such; but even allowing for promotional framing, they show how far the service had travelled from the roughly 110,000 households that its BKF predecessor could reach on cable before satellite distribution began in 2012.

Origins as BKF in Burgenland

The first launch in the channel's history is that of BKF — Das Burgenlandfernsehen — which officially began broadcasting in 1997. BKF was the cable television service of Burgenland, Austria's easternmost state, and it was owned by the Burgenland electricity utility BEWAG. Its existence reflected a pattern of the Austrian cable era, in which regional infrastructure companies operated local information channels for their service areas. Before its sale, BKF could be received in around 110,000 households, of which about 35,000 were in Burgenland and 75,000 in neighbouring Lower Austria.

At the end of November 2011 BEWAG agreed to sell BKF to Vienna's Bohmann publishing group, subject to approval by the BEWAG supervisory board and the broadcasting authority; BEWAG explained the sale as a concentration on its core energy business. Regulatory approval followed at the start of January 2012. The Bohmann group, a Vienna publisher with close ties to the city's publishing landscape, intended something more ambitious than a Burgenland cable service: a regional channel for the whole eastern region, under a new name — Schau TV.

Schau TV from 2012

The transition was staged with unusual visibility. As early as 26 October 2011 a test image for the new Schau TV appeared on the channel slot, inviting the audience to engage with the coming service on social media; the timing shared a transponder development with ORF III, which began its regular service the same day. Schau TV's regular broadcasting began on 1 February 2012, when the channel was also switched onto digital satellite, supplementing the cable distribution it had inherited. Satellite carriage transformed its potential audience from a two-state cable footprint into a national one, even though its editorial focus remained the east: Vienna, Lower Austria and Burgenland.

Under Bohmann, Schau TV operated as the eastern member of the emerging family of Austrian regional channels — the service that later listings of the R9 network name for Vienna, Burgenland and Lower Austria. Its programming followed the regional model of news, magazines and service content built around a weekly and daily cycle, and it joined the other large state channels in the R9 marketing alliance founded in 2013, through which regional channels could sell national advertising and share the ÖsterreichBlick magazine format.

Takeover by the Kurier media house

Rumours of a Kurier entry circulated from May 2017, and in August 2017 the Kurier media house took over the channel completely. The takeover brought an immediate visual relaunch of the Schau TV on-screen design and technical renewal, with the stated aim of increasing the channel's reach in the Kurier newspaper's own core territories of Burgenland, Lower Austria and Vienna — a neat geographic match between the newspaper's heartland and the channel's region. At the moment of takeover the editorial base was still in Eisenstadt, the Burgenland capital.

The centre of gravity then moved to Vienna. In January 2018 the channel's new studio location in Vienna was completed, from which the Kurier News and other formats and interviews were produced, with production and broadcasting thereafter partly in HD. Integration with the newspaper deepened steadily: Kurier news services several times a day drew on the newspaper newsroom, Kurier Talk formats discussed the week's issues with experts, and regional service and lifestyle magazines such as schau LEBEN were extended to weekends with separate Burgenland and Lower Austria editions. The media house later recalled that daily reach at takeover had been around 30,000 viewers; by the autumn of 2019 it reported up to 80,000 viewers a day and a technical reach above 2.2 million households, with programmes streamable live and available in a media library for at least thirty days.

Relaunch as Kurier TV in 2023

On 9 February 2023 Schau TV was renamed Kurier TV. The media house presented the renaming and rebranding as a step that made the channel's integration with all the Kurier media house's cross-media offers explicit, in content and in marketing, and that underlined the push of moving image across all digital Kurier channels. At the same time broadcasting hours were extended to a full twenty-four hours, and new formats were announced: daily information and service magazines, a daily produced magazine working up the media house's current themes with talks and reports, and further regional programme development.

The relaunched evening schedule included a 20:15 strand, with the talk format Kurier Checkpoint on Wednesdays and discussion rounds in Club 3 on Saturdays, alongside the established Kurier News and Kurier Talks and the house's own documentaries. The relaunch statement recorded the scale the channel claimed by then: a technical reach of more than five million Austrians and more than 150,000 viewers daily on average, with the thematic focus unchanged — regional infotainment and quality journalism from the eastern region, now under the newspaper's name.

Programming

Kurier TV's programme is an information and regional schedule rather than an entertainment schedule. Its backbone is news from the Kurier newsroom: Kurier News bulletins produced in the Vienna studio, talks and interviews, and magazines that rework the newspaper's current coverage for television. Around that backbone sit regional reporting from Vienna, Lower Austria and Burgenland, service and lifestyle magazines, business and motoring formats developed in the Schau TV years in cooperation with the media house's other brands, documentaries produced in-house, and discussion formats in the evening.

As a member of the R9 network, the channel also participates in the shared regional system, including the ÖsterreichBlick magazine that draws highlights from all nine state channels. Its role in that network is as the eastern-region member, the successor position to Schau TV's. Viewers should note the channel's dual identity in the programme itself: part regional channel for the east, in the R9 sense, and part national newspaper television, in the Kurier sense — the 2023 rebrand deliberately strengthened the second identity without abandoning the first.

Ownership

Kurier TV is owned by the Kurier media house, the publishing group of the Kurier daily newspaper, and its managing director in the channel's published listings is Thomas Kralinger, the media house's leading executive. The newspaper behind the channel was founded in Vienna in 1954, in succession to the Wiener Kurier first published by the United States forces in Austria in 1945, and it remains one of Austria's principal national dailies, published by Kurier-Zeitungsverlag und Druckerei GmbH with the German Funke Mediengruppe as a major shareholder in the publishing structure.

For the channel, newspaper ownership means both a newsroom and a business model. The newsroom supplies journalism, presenters and themes across print, online and television; the business model bundles television into the media house's advertising and cross-media sales. Austrian media histories place Kurier's television move in the wave of publisher television from 2016 onwards, when Austria's newspaper houses — first the Fellner group's oe24 TV, then Kurier with Schau TV, then the Kronen Zeitung with Krone TV — concluded that video their websites needed anyway could also sustain a broadcast channel supported by private-broadcasting funding.

Distribution and reach

Kurier TV is distributed by cable in HD, by IPTV services including Zattoo and Joyn and the Simpli IPTV platform, and by livestream. Its over-the-air history has contracted: antenna distribution via Simpli in MUX C for Vienna, Styria and Upper Austria, available from 2020, was discontinued, and on 1 January 2025 the channel's carriage on the Astra satellite at 19.2 degrees East ended. The channel's modern reach is therefore built on cable and internet delivery rather than on the satellite footprint that had defined its Schau TV expansion in 2012.

No independent audience series for the channel is published in the sources used here beyond the operator's own figures at takeover, in 2019 and at the 2023 relaunch, which show daily viewing rising from about 30,000 to up to 80,000 and then to an average above 150,000. Those are company statements, repeated here with that attribution, and they are consistent with the channel's observable expansion in hours, studios and formats over the same period.

Significance and limits of the record

Kurier TV's significance is threefold. It preserves, in modern form, one of Austria's oldest regional television lineages, reaching back to BKF in 1997. It is the eastern-region member of the R9 system that organises Austrian regional television nationally. And it is a leading example of the Austrian newspaper-television model, in which a serious national daily operates a broadcast news channel as part of its cross-media house — a model whose economics Austrian commentators have watched closely, noting both the synergies and how demanding and expensive television proved for its publisher owners.

The limits of the record should also be noted. Much of the detailed history comes from the German-language reference and trade sources rather than from a large independent literature, audience data are the operator's own, and the channel's early BKF decade is documented only in outline. Within those limits, the verifiable story is continuous and well dated: BKF in 1997, sale to Bohmann in late 2011, Schau TV from 1 February 2012, full Kurier takeover in August 2017, Vienna studio in January 2018, and Kurier TV, broadcasting around the clock, from 9 February 2023.