About RTS Regionalfernsehen Salzburg

RTS Regionalfernsehen Salzburg

RTS Regionalfernsehen Salzburg, branded as RTS – Regional TV Salzburg and operated by RTS Regionalfernsehen GmbH, is the private regional television channel for the Austrian state of Salzburg. Based at Wals-Siezenheim, just outside the city of Salzburg, it began broadcasting on 4 November 2009 and produces a weekly cycle of Salzburg magazine programmes — above all the Salzburg Magazin — rather than daily news. RTS is the Salzburg member of the R9 network of Austria's nine leading regional channels, and it is unusual among them for the deliberateness of its editorial ethos: the company states that it values constructive and respectful journalism and aims to produce exclusively violence-free, family-friendly television.

The channel's story is also a Salzburg media story in miniature. RTS launched a decade after the state's pioneering private channel Salzburg TV had dramatised the birth of Austrian private television, and in 2020 RTS moved into the former premises of ServusTV, the national channel Salzburg TV became. A small, privately owned regional broadcaster — four individual shareholders, fewer than twenty employees, and a team made up entirely of video journalists — thus occupies a physical and symbolic place in the state's television history.

Overview

RTS is a private regional full programme for the state of Salzburg, broadcasting in high definition at 1080p. It produces four half-hour editorial television formats per week with a Salzburg focus, plus the co-produced nationwide format ÖsterreichBlick. Outside its satellite windows, all of its formats are repeated for a week around the clock in a loop, so RTS operates a weekly programme rather than a daily one and produces no daily news. Its best-known format, the Salzburg Magazin, appears new on Wednesdays and Fridays.

The channel's seat is listed as Wals-Himmelreich in its reference data, and the operating company is headquartered in Wals-Siezenheim, the municipality adjoining Salzburg on the side of Salzburg Airport. Directory listings for this profile place the channel in Salzburg itself, reflecting its service area and identity; the production base is in Wals, in a building whose top floor RTS took over in 2020 — the former ServusTV rooms in the Greentower.

Launch and development

RTS began operations on 4 November 2009. The launch came in the maturing phase of Austrian regional television: the R9 alliance was still four years away, but the model of a state channel with a weekly magazine cycle, carried on the state's cable networks and repeated in a loop, was well established as the economically viable form of private regional broadcasting outside Vienna and Linz. RTS adopted that model and has kept it, with unusual consistency, ever since.

The channel's one physical move is well documented. In 2020 RTS took over the former premises of ServusTV and is housed on the top floor of the Greentower in Wals. The symbolism was noted locally: ServusTV had grown out of Salzburg TV, the channel whose unauthorised terrestrial start in October 2000 — shut down after five days, followed by its managing director's hunger strike in protest — had forced the creation of Austria's private television law. The state's regional channel now works where its national successor worked, a reminder that Salzburg has played an outsized part in Austrian television history.

Ownership and people

The media owner of RTS is RTS Regionalfernsehen GmbH, owned by four private individuals. The shareholding is divided between two Salzburg families: Josef Aichinger holds forty per cent, Christian Struber thirty per cent, Elisabeth Struber twenty per cent and Susanne Gusenbauer ten per cent — described in summary as fifty per cent each for the Aichinger and Struber families. The managing director is Josef Aichinger, a businessman and former politician who was deputy mayor of the Salzburg municipality of Abtenau; co-owner Christian Struber was mayor of Sankt Koloman. Susanne Gusenbauer serves as authorised signatory, and in 2024 the long-serving video journalist Manuela Kunzier took over programme management, with Evelyn Laimer principally responsible for sales.

The staffing model is distinctive and documented by the company itself. RTS employed eighteen people at the time of its earlier published company profiles and seventeen employees in 2024, supplemented by numerous freelancers. For reasons of efficiency, the newsroom employs exclusively video journalists, who independently handle the camera, editing and research work for television reports themselves. A team of that size producing four half-hour formats a week is a tight operation, and the all-in-one video-journalist model is the mechanism that makes it possible.

Programming

The flagship is the Salzburg Magazin, renewed on Wednesdays and Fridays, covering the life of the city and state of Salzburg. The other long-running formats named in the channel's programme record are RTS Sport kompakt for Salzburg sport, the Kultur Format for culture, Bunter Leben, PULS – Das Gesundheitsmagazin for health, and the documentary series Orte, Zeit und Zeugen — places, time and witnesses — together with the weekly ÖsterreichBlick co-produced by all nine R9 channels. The Vimeo archive through which RTS publishes its reports shows the magazine's daily texture: municipal and community stories from across the state, agriculture and food producers, tourism preparations, charity and social projects, traditions and local business.

Two absences define the programme as much as its contents. RTS produces no daily news bulletin, and its weekly loop means a story may run for a week — a magazine's rhythm, not a news channel's. And its stated editorial line excludes violent content in favour of constructive, respectful, family-friendly reporting. In a regional market where ORF Salzburg provides daily television news through Salzburg heute, RTS has chosen complementarity over imitation: the weekly magazine layer that a daily news service does not supply.

Distribution and schedule

RTS is receivable around the clock in the cable network of Salzburg AG, on A1 Xplore TV and via internet livestream. On the R9 Österreich HD satellite channel it is seen daily in two windows, from 15:00 to 16:00 and from 21:00 to 22:00. Outside satellite reception, every format is repeated in the week-long loop described above. The channel also integrated the R9 group's HbbTV on-demand portal into its own cable signal, so that all R9 channels are available on demand through the red button on the R9 satellite channel — a project RTS itself led for the group, described further below.

That distribution profile is typical of the stronger Austrian state channels: universal availability within its own state by cable, a national presence through the joint satellite channel, and streaming for its own audience wherever they are. It does not include terrestrial broadcasting of its own, and no separate RTS audience subscription product exists; the livestream and video archives are free.

Audience

The channel's published audience evidence comes from an IMAS reach analysis of February 2020 with a sample of seven hundred. According to that study, 94,000 Salzburgers had watched RTS at least in the previous week; on the basis of the total population, one in five Salzburgers — twenty-one per cent — watched RTS at least weekly. The average viewing duration was 14.3 minutes, appropriate to a magazine-loop channel joined for a programme rather than a day-long companion.

The same study found a measurable south-north gradient within the state: respondents from the southern districts — Tennengau, Pongau, Pinzgau and Lungau — showed comparatively higher awareness and viewing values than the city and north. That pattern is plausible for a channel whose magazine content serves the rural districts that Salzburg city media reach least, and it underlines RTS's function as the state-wide medium for the whole Land Salzburg, not only its capital.

Role in the R9 network

In 2013 the nine leading regional channels, one from each federal state, joined together under the umbrella brand R9 to market regional television at national level through R9 Regional TV Austria GmbH; since 2015 R9 Österreich HD has been receivable on Astra at 19.2 degrees East, and with it RTS nationally. The cross-state magazine ÖsterreichBlick, co-produced by the nine channels, was honoured with a Romy Academy Prize in 2015. RTS's documented contribution goes beyond membership: in 2020, on behalf of the R9 group, RTS played the leading role in developing a national HbbTV portal through which all R9 channels are available on demand around the clock on a single channel; the broadcasting regulator RTR supported the project from the Digitalisation Fund with 75,410 euros.

For a channel of fewer than twenty staff to lead a national technical project for the whole group is a noteworthy fact, and it suggests the regard in which the Salzburg company's technical competence is held within the network. RTS's authorised signatory and management have accordingly been visible in the group's national work beyond what the channel's size would predict.

Digital presence

RTS distributes its reporting extensively online. Its reports are published as individual videos — the channel's Vimeo archive runs to hundreds of pages of items from the Salzburg Magazin and its sister formats — alongside the livestream of the channel itself and the HbbTV on-demand integration in its cable and the group's satellite signals. The digital pattern matches the broadcast one: each magazine item is a self-contained video, made by a single video journalist, equally usable in the weekly loop, in the archive and on social distribution.

The company presents its identity online under the motto that regionality connects — Regionalität verbindet — and its published mission emphasises constructive journalism and family-friendly content. In an Austrian regional landscape often defined simply by geography, RTS's explicit editorial positioning is its distinguishing digital and brand feature.

Significance and limits of the record

RTS matters as Salzburg's dedicated private regional channel: the state-level complement to ORF Salzburg and to the national ServusTV that also calls the Salzburg area home. Its R9 membership gives Salzburg full representation in the national regional system, its HbbTV leadership gave it a national technical role, and its longevity since 2009 — in a sector where many launches failed quickly — demonstrates the durability of the weekly-magazine regional model when costs and format are honestly matched.

The limits of the record are straightforward: the channel's history is documented mainly in one detailed German-language reference article and the company's own published data; audience evidence is a single 2020 study rather than a continuous series; and the seed listing for this profile, drawn from the RTR register and R9, gave the seat as Salzburg where the fuller record specifies Wals-Siezenheim. None of that undermines the core documented facts — launch on 4 November 2009, the named ownership and management, the four-formats-a-week model, the distribution and the R9 role — on which this profile rests.