About Puls 24

Puls 24

Puls 24 is an Austrian news and live events television channel owned by ProSiebenSat.1 PULS 4, the Austrian subsidiary of the German ProSiebenSat.1 Media group, and headquartered in Vienna. It launched on 1 September 2019 as the group's fourth home-grown Austrian free-TV channel, alongside Puls 4, ATV and ATV2. Puls 24 is a special-interest channel, a Spartenprogramm, for rolling news, live events, politics and sport, broadcasting 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with a matching app and online service. Its founding promise, expressed by its parent group, was to be local, live and Austrian, and to shed light on both sides of a story.

Puls 24 was a direct answer to a gap in the Austrian market. Until the newspaper groups entered television, Austria had no domestic private rolling news channel; viewers who wanted continuous news watched ORF or German and international news channels. The Fellner group's oe24 TV had shown from 2016 that an Austrian private news channel could find an audience. Puls 24 brought the resources of Austria's largest private television group to the same idea, combining a linear channel, an app and a central newsroom that also serves Puls 4.

First life as a pop-up channel on ZAPPN

Puls 24 did not begin on television. It was first brought to life as a breaking news pop-up channel on ZAPPN, the ProSiebenSat.1 group's free streaming app in Austria, in June 2019. The experiment let the group test a live news service on a digital platform before committing to a full channel. On 30 August 2019 the group announced that the project was ready to take the next step, and on Sunday 1 September 2019 Puls 24 officially aired for the first time as a television channel, opening with a live prime-time broadcast at 8.15pm featuring Sebastian Kurz, Peter Pilz and other leading political figures. That opening programme signalled the channel's intent: Austrian politics, live, in prime time, on a private channel.

Launch promises: live, local and on both sides

The launch statements set out the channel's editorial identity in unusual detail. Markus Breitenecker, founder and chief executive of Puls 4, said Puls 24 would be the first news and live event platform in Austria to produce local and international news and events in one place and distribute it centrally to all devices, and he framed the channel as a response to an era of fake news and growing mistrust of the authenticity and reliability of news. The group's answer was live reporting, giving audiences a direct, unadulterated view of the country's most important events. Stefanie Groiss-Horowitz, general manager of Puls 4 and Puls 24, said the channel wanted to give stories the time they deserve, to shed light on all sides of political and social developments, and to cover the most significant events as they happen, with the stated aim to be local, live and Austrian and to add value to national and international television offers. The editorial principle was summarised in the phrase: shed light on both sides. Coverage was promised across information and news, business, technology, health, sports, society, service and entertainment, presented as serious, independent and live.

A 360-degree news platform, not just a channel

ProSiebenSat.1 described Puls 24 as a 360-degree project folding in innovations from the television and digital sectors, and as a natural development in the digital transformation of the media house. The television channel launched together with an independent Puls 24 app designed for mobile use, presenting the essential news of the day in German. The app's five documented features at launch were a 24/7 live stream, a dynamic list of trending personalities whose order changes with news trends, an up-rank function connecting personalities in the live stream to those rankings, a curated news area overseen by the editorial team, and an artificial intelligence news area in which updates from diverse sources are selected and summarised into bullet points using what the group described as trustworthy AI technology. The channel itself was made available free across all platforms: via satellite, antenna, on cable networks and through the app, web and live stream. This platform-neutral launch distinguished Puls 24 from conventional channel launches and placed it in competition with online news services as much as with television rivals.

The central newsroom of the group

Puls 24 concentrated the journalistic power of the whole Puls 4 organisation. At launch the group stated that it was concentrating the journalistic output from each of Puls 4's branches, from news to talk, television magazines, society and sport, and that the new Puls 24 newsroom would be the beating journalistic heart of the group and become an even stronger muscle for it. In practice, the Puls 4 news operation, which had been built up over the previous decade, was reorganised around the new channel, and Puls 4's own newscasts were aligned with the Puls 24 brand. After the group acquired ATV, its newsroom was integrated with that of Puls 4 for production, although the ATV newscast remained editorially separate on competition grounds. From 2022, the ATV Aktuell and Puls 24 news outputs were unified under a single Puls 24 Aktuell brand, while the Puls 4, Puls 24 and ATV editions continued to be produced separately. Puls 24 is therefore not only a channel but the name of the group's entire news operation.

Programming: rolling news, talk and live events

The channel's schedule combines rolling news bulletins with discussion and event programming. Its documented evening structure was restructured for the major election year of 2024: from January 2024 the discussion programme Wild Umstritten, meaning wildly controversial, was scheduled from Monday to Thursday at 9.00pm, while the information programme Heiß Umfehdet took the 8.00pm slot with discussions, duels, reports and interviews focused on the country's top topics, and the sister channel Puls 4's talk format Pro und Contra received a new studio at the same time. Political debate coverage extends to set-piece live events shared with Puls 4, such as televised debates on Austrian climate policy broadcast live in prime time. The channel's definition at launch explicitly included live events as a genre alongside news, and major press conferences, election programmes and public events form a recurring part of its output.

Sport on a news channel

Sport is a documented part of the Puls 24 remit, consistent with its classification as a news, events, politics and sport channel. Its most prominent documented rights deal brought the US Open tennis championship to free-to-air television in Austria: under a multi-year sub-licensing agreement with the original rights holder Sportdeutschland.TV, Puls 24 broadcast the tournament on its linear channel, the Joyn streaming service and online, showing two matches daily until the quarter-finals, expanded coverage in the quarter-finals and one semi-final with first pick, beginning with the 2024 tournament, in which Austrian former champion Dominic Thiem received a wild card in his final season. The deal shows how a news channel can use marquee live sport as event programming, and it built on the group's existing sports presence on Puls 4, which includes NFL American football and UEFA club competitions.

Ownership and sister channels

Puls 24 is wholly part of ProSiebenSat.1 PULS 4 GmbH, a subsidiary of ProSiebenSat.1 Media SE. Company descriptions identify the group as Austria's largest private television group and as the operator of the four Austrian free-TV programmes Puls 4, ATV, ATV2 and Puls 24, of which Puls 4, launched nationally in 2008, is described as the largest Austrian private channel. The group also operates the Austrian advertising and programme windows of ProSieben Austria, Sat.1 Österreich, kabel eins Austria and other German group channels, produces local content including daily news for those windows, operates digital platforms and apps, and stages the 4GAMECHANGERS festival. Puls 24's headquarters are in Vienna with the rest of the group. No separate website was recorded for Puls 24 in the batch research underlying this profile; its established online home is puls24.at, which the group promoted at launch as the channel's web and live stream address.

Competition with oe24 TV

Puls 24 entered a market that oe24 TV, the Fellner group's news channel launched in 2016 in cooperation with CNN, had created. Industry commentary at the time explicitly described Puls 24 as the ProSiebenSat.1 group's response to oe24 TV, and its subsequent development, including the unification of the group's news brands under Puls 24 Aktuell, reflects that rivalry. The two channels represent different models of Austrian private news: oe24 TV grew out of a newspaper and online portal group, while Puls 24 grew out of an established television group with a large existing newsroom, entertainment channels to cross-promote it and a streaming platform of its own. Their competition, alongside ORF's news output, means Austrian viewers now have multiple domestic rolling news services where a decade earlier there were none.

Assessment and limits of the record

The launch of Puls 24 is exceptionally well documented for an Austrian channel, because ProSiebenSat.1 published detailed statements of its purpose, platform design and editorial principles. The verified record covers its June 2019 pop-up origin on ZAPPN, its 1 September 2019 television launch and opening programme, its app features, its free distribution across satellite, antenna and cable, its role as the group's central newsroom, its documented evening talk formats and its US Open tennis deal. It is thinner on independent audience measurement and on the channel's day-to-day schedule beyond its flagship evening programmes, and group descriptions of its own services are promotional in tone, a caveat this profile has kept in view by attributing claims to the group where they originate. No ratings or programme details beyond those documented have been added.