Top Channel
Top Channel is an Albanian national commercial television network, not a British channel. It broadcasts in Albanian from Tirana — from its headquarters in Kashar, on the edge of the capital — and it is the flagship of Top Media Group, the conglomerate founded by entrepreneur Dritan Hoxha. Its connection to the United Kingdom is the Albanian diaspora and satellite distribution: since September 2003 Top Channel has been available via satellite across Europe through the DigitAlb platform, and through IPTV and streaming services aimed at Albanians abroad, so viewers in Britain watch the Tirana channel itself — its news, its comedy institution Portokalli and its Big Brother seasons — rather than any UK-made service.
At home the channel's rise was one of the fastest in European television. Within two years of its launch it was ranked the most-watched station in Albania, and it has remained a defining force in Albanian popular culture, credited with bringing international formats and high-end production values into a market that, a decade earlier, had known only a state broadcaster.
Dritan Hoxha and the birth of Top Media
The founder's story is inseparable from the channel's. In the 1990s Dritan Hoxha was an entrepreneur and coffee importer from Laprakë, a district of Tirana, in the turbulent first decade of post-communist Albania. He moved into media by founding Top Media Group in 1998, beginning with radio: Top Albania Radio was his first venture. Coffee, through the Lori Caffe business, remained part of the group he built, but media — radio, then television, then a digital pay-TV platform — made his name, and he came to be described as a pioneer of digital media in the region.
Top Channel was founded as a company in 2000, began experimental broadcasts on 30 July 2001 from the International Centre for Culture in Tirana — the building universally known as the Pyramid of Tirana — and launched officially on 20 December 2001. It set out from the start as a generalist channel with the latest technology and a recruited team of well-known journalists, in deliberate contrast to the under-funded state television Albanians were used to.
The fastest rise in Albanian television
The results were immediate. A national survey in 2003 ranked Top Channel the most-watched television station in Albania with 50 per cent of the audience, up from 11.9 per cent in 2002. Contemporary explanations pointed to two things: the quality of its broadcasting technology, in a country where production values had lagged, and programming focused on current issues in Albanian society, talking to a young post-communist audience about its own life rather than broadcasting at it.
By 2003 the channel's signal covered the whole of Albania's territory, and in January 2008 it was awarded national frequency coverage, making it only the third channel in the country to hold that status. In 2004 Hoxha launched the pay-per-view platform DigitAlb, Albania's first digital television service, which strengthened the group and gave Top Channel its European satellite route: from September 2003 the channel had already been available across Europe through DigitAlb, years before streaming made diaspora television routine.
Programmes that built a national conversation
Top Channel's schedule mixed imported formats with home-grown institutions. It brought Albania international franchises including Big Brother, first aired in 2008 and returning in its later Big Brother Albania seasons, and The Voice. Its own formats became just as influential. Fiks Fare, its satirical investigative show, exposed corruption and social problems with a comic edge and was widely copied by competitors. Portokalli, the Sunday comedy show launched in the mid-2000s, became a national ritual of sketches and political satire. Top Fest ran as a major music competition for Albanian-speaking artists from 2004 to 2015.
Around those pillars sat the full generalist structure: daily news bulletins from 2001 onwards, the political talk show Shqip hosted by Rudina Xhunga from 2002 to 2015, Top Show's culture and politics discussions from 2003 to 2020, the revived political debate programme Top Story, the entertainment magazine E Diell from 2008, and afternoon talk with Ftesë në 5 from 2018. Morning television, reality formats such as the dating show Përputhen, and business reality with StarTop kept the pipeline of new formats moving. In 2025 the channel announced a further shift, reducing films and series in favour of new original shows, with new titles including the morning show Wake Up and the wedding competition Lufta e Nuseve.
Ownership after the founder
Dritan Hoxha died on 23 May 2008, aged 40, in a car accident involving his Ferrari 599. His funeral was attended by senior state figures including the president of the republic. Leadership of the group passed to his widow, Vjollca Hoxha. Their daughter Lori Hoxha later entered the management of the group and was appointed chief executive of Top Media in 2022.
Ownership was contested for years. In 2007, shortly before his death, Hoxha had sold 60 per cent of the company — 40 per cent to Albert Sino and 20 per cent to Aurel Baci, for a recorded total of 315.2 million lek. Vjollca Hoxha challenged the sale in court, arguing it had been signed without her consent as a spouse. The legal saga ended only in January 2023, when Albania's High Court recognised the heirs of Dritan Hoxha as the sole owners of the company. Media Ownership Monitor accordingly lists Top Channel's ownership as 100 per cent with the Hoxha family interests.
The Pyramid eviction and the move to Kashar
The channel's first home was symbolic: the Pyramid of Tirana, the monumental former museum in the centre of the capital. On 18 March 2013, following an order of Albania's Supreme Court, Top Channel was evicted from the Pyramid and its employees were ordered by state police to vacate the building immediately, even though the channel said its lease, granted by the Council of Ministers, ran until 2025. The channel characterised the eviction as politically motivated, in a period when its investigative reporting had put it in deep conflict with the government of Sali Berisha over satellite licences and corruption allegations.
Top Channel relocated its headquarters to a building in Kashar, Tirana, where it remains based. The move ended the Pyramid era but not the channel's exposure to Albania's political violence: on 27 March 2023 a shooting attack on the Kashar headquarters killed security guard Pal Kola, when shots were fired from a Range Rover with an AK-47; the vehicle was later found burned. The channel's own statement described the killing as a terrorist attack on the station.
Top Media Group around the channel
Top Channel does not stand alone. Top Media Group, described as one of the largest media conglomerates in Albania, includes Top Albania Radio, Top Gold Radio and My Music Radio, the daily newspaper Shqip and Shqip Magazine, DigitAlb, the news channel Top News, the music channel musicAL, VGA Studio, the Dritan Hoxha Media Foundation, Imperial Cinemas and Top Channel Films, alongside the Lori Caffe coffee business that reflects the founder's origins. The television channel is the group's public face and its most valuable brand.
The group has also traded on cooperation beyond commerce. Top Channel has worked with international organisations including UNDP, UNICEF, the International Organization for Migration, the OSCE, USAID and the Red Cross, and with private partners such as Vodafone, and it maintains partnerships with international news agencies including Reuters for its news operation.
Technology and distribution
Top Channel made a point of technological leadership from its launch marketing onwards. It began broadcasting in 16:9 widescreen high definition in 2009 and transitioned entirely to HD in 2012, broadcasting in both 576i standard definition and 1080i high definition. Domestically it is carried on Albania's DVB-T2 terrestrial network and on analogue in some regions, and it is grouped with the DigitAlb network for distribution.
Beyond Albania, the distribution map explains its place in a UK directory. Satellite carriage across Europe through DigitAlb began in September 2003; in North America the channel has been carried via TVALB and Shqip TV; and it is accessible through IPTV platforms and local cable providers in countries such as Switzerland. Each of those routes targets the same audience: the large Albanian-speaking diaspora created by emigration in the 1990s and 2000s.
Reception in the United Kingdom
Top Channel holds no UK licence and appears on no British terrestrial or free satellite guide. A viewer in the United Kingdom watches it as a diaspora service: through DigitAlb's European satellite offer, where the channel is part of a subscription platform rather than a free-to-air signal, or through Albanian IPTV and streaming services such as TVALB that package Albanian channels for viewers abroad, including catch-up and timeshift viewing of Top Channel via DigitAlb's own OTT service.
What that audience watches is unedited Tirana television: Albanian-language news led by Albanian politics, Portokalli's satire about Albanian public life, and reality and entertainment formats produced for the home market. For the Albanian community in Britain — one of the largest Albanian diaspora communities in Europe — that directness is the service's entire value.
Why Top Channel matters
Top Channel matters because it defined what post-communist Albanian television could look like: privately owned, technologically ambitious, populist in the best sense, and willing to investigate the governments of the day. It survived its founder's sudden death, a fifteen-year ownership battle, eviction from its famous first home and a fatal attack on its headquarters, and it remains, under the second generation of the Hoxha family, the centrepiece of Albania's largest media group. For viewers in Britain who find it through DigitAlb or an Albanian streaming package, it is simply home television, delivered from Tirana.
