About UniRío TV

UniRío TV

UniRío TV is the public television channel of the Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto (UNRC), in the city of Río Cuarto, Córdoba Province, Argentina. It broadcasts on channel 31.1 of the Televisión Digital Abierta (TDA), Argentina's free-to-air digital terrestrial platform, and streams through the university's website. Its official transmissions began on 7 July 2016. UniRío TV defines its mission as producing quality content anchored in local and regional reality, made with the public spirit of the institution it belongs to — other voices and other perspectives, with a strong local imprint and the social commitment proper to a public signal. Although the channel itself is young, it is the product of an audiovisual tradition inside the university that stretches back to 1985, three decades before the channel existed.

Legal foundations

UniRío TV exists because of Argentina's 2009 Audiovisual Communication Services Law, which reserved spectrum for the public and university sectors. By AFSCA Resolution 687 of 2011, national universities were assigned frequencies in the UHF band; the Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto was allotted frequency 31.1, and internal work began to build a channel on the base of the university's existing audiovisual production department. The assignment was made definitive on 1 October 2015, when AFSCA Resolution 0891/15, issued in Buenos Aires, assigned the UNRC the channel for the provision of open digital terrestrial television. With the frequency secured in 2015, the university had its own signal within the TDA grid, and official transmissions of UniRío TV began on 7 July 2016. The channel is one of the group of Argentine university channels — alongside signals such as those of La Plata, Litoral, Córdoba and Villa María — that the 2009 law brought into existence after more than fifty years in which the entire university system had created only two television signals.

Three decades of university audiovisual production

The channel's prehistory is long and well documented by the university. In 1985 the UNRC created its Departamento de Producción Audiovisual, integrating video and television, photography and graphics areas. From then on the video/TV area produced science-communication videos and material publicising the university's academic and institutional activities; more than 560 audiovisual works of diverse formats and contents are now archived and digitised. In 1987 the university signed an agreement joining the Asociación de Televisión Educativa Iberoamericana (ATEI), the Ibero-American educational television association. In 2006 the UNRC participated in the founding of RENAU, the Red Nacional Audiovisual Universitaria, within the National Interuniversity Council — the network through which Argentina's university channels share production and policy.

Canal Universidad and the road to an own signal

Long before it had a frequency of its own, the university was on television in its city. In 1990, under an agreement between the UNRC and the cable company Río Cuarto Cable Color, a two-hour weekday slot called Canal Universidad began broadcasting; the university maintains a daily television space in the local cable grid to this day. In August 2005 an agreement with Colsecor, the cooperative television service, allowed the university's audiovisual products to be distributed in ten Argentine provinces, reaching 210 localities directly — an early demonstration that university production from Río Cuarto could find audiences far beyond the campus. In February 2013 the university signed an agreement with the local open channel Canal Quatro TV Digital for the daily broadcast of the news programme Universidad Informa. By then the UNRC had spaces on Cablevisión, Canal 13 of Río Cuarto and Canal Quatro, but it was projecting itself as an institution with the capacity and track record to run a channel of its own — the role UniRío TV now fills.

Preparations were practical as well as legal. In April 2015 work began on installing the ARSAT shelter that would allow local channels, including UniRío TV, to join the TDA grid in Río Cuarto, with test connections and connectivity between the campus and the TDA antenna. The university had presented its file to AFSCA in December 2013, and its rector at the time, Marcelo Ruiz, framed the project publicly as a commitment to free television that would socialise, for the whole population of the south of the province, content produced by local organisations and cooperative spaces.

The university behind the channel

The Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto was founded in 1971, and from its foundation it built a strong presence across the centre-south of Córdoba Province. Its communication training has deep roots: a three-year Técnico en Comunicación Audiovisual degree was taught in the 1970s and 1980s, a Licenciatura en Ciencias de la Comunicación has been offered since 1988 in the Faculty of Human Sciences, and since 1999 the Faculty of Engineering has taught Telecommunications Engineering. UniRío TV sits within a wider university media system that also includes Radio Universidad FM 97.7, the newspaper Hoja Aparte and the institutional press area — structures that, as the university itself records, consolidated over twenty-five years through content made mostly by professionals trained at the UNRC itself. That staffing pattern is one of the channel's defining features: the people who make its programmes were largely educated by the institution that broadcasts them.

Programming

UniRío TV's output follows the public-university model: journalistic, educational, cultural and science-communication content produced in Río Cuarto and its region, complemented by material shared through the university networks. University reporting on the channel's early production names journalistic products such as El Lugar del Hecho and Contame un cuento, and the micro-formats Ahí Va. The channel's stated aim is to develop quality audiovisual content that contributes other voices and perspectives, with a strong local and regional imprint and the social commitment of a public signal. In practice that means covering the life of the city and the agricultural region around it — university research, cultural activity, community organisations and regional stories that the Buenos Aires-centred national media rarely reach — alongside the university's own academic and institutional life.

Place in Argentine university television

Academic studies of Argentine university television place UniRío TV in the wave of channels created after 2009, when the Audiovisual Communication Services Law allowed public universities to exercise the right to a television signal reflecting educational policy and science communication from a public-screen perspective. Researchers note that by the time of that expansion the universities already operated more than ten channels on air, and UniRío — as the studies name it — is counted among them alongside Villa María's signal in the same province. For Córdoba, which also has the historic Canal 10 of the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, UniRío TV extended university television beyond the provincial capital to the second city of the province.

A signal built slowly

UniRío TV is best understood as the final step of an unusually patient construction. The university created its audiovisual department in 1985, joined the Ibero-American educational television association in 1987, put a daily university slot on local cable in 1990, achieved distribution to 210 localities through the cooperative Colsecor network in 2005, helped found the national university audiovisual network RENAU in 2006, placed a daily news programme on a local open channel in 2013, obtained its definitive digital assignment in 2015 and launched its own channel in 2016. Each step is documented in the university's own institutional record, and together they distinguish UniRío TV from channels created by a single decree: when the signal finally went on air on TDA 31.1, the production teams, the archive of more than 560 works, the academic programmes that train its staff and the audience relationships built through cable all already existed. The licence completed the institution; it did not create it.

How to watch and why it matters

UniRío TV is available free to air on TDA channel 31.1 in Río Cuarto and online through the university's site, which lowers the barrier between the university and the city to the price of a television set. Its significance is best understood against the structure of Argentine television, in which production is heavily concentrated in Buenos Aires and interior cities typically receive national schedules with thin local windows. A university channel in a city of Río Cuarto's size gives the region a screen of its own: produced by a public institution, staffed substantially by its own graduates, legally guaranteed by the 2009 media law, and devoted to the local and regional reality that its mission statement promises. The record behind it — a production department from 1985, a cable slot from 1990, distribution to 210 localities by 2005 — shows an institution that practised television for thirty years before it finally held a licence, which is why UniRío TV's launch in 2016 completed a trajectory rather than starting one.