About Xəzər TV

Xəzər TV

Xəzər TV, also rendered Xazar TV and meaning Caspian TV, is a nationwide private television channel in Azerbaijan, broadcasting in Azerbaijani from Baku. It began on 11 January 2000 as STV Xazar, the Azerbaijani feed of Turkey's Samanyolu TV, and took its present form in the autumn of 2007, when it won the frequency contest that followed the removal of foreign channels from Azerbaijani terrestrial broadcasting and relaunched under the slogan Ailənizin Xəzəri, Your Family's Khazar. Operated through the Khazar Media Center, the channel built its reputation on a distinctive, Turkish-styled presentation of news and on daily television series, and by January 2016 it was ranked by AGB and Nielsen measurement as the most-watched television channel in Azerbaijan. In March 2020 the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan, SOCAR, acquired the channel through its media structures, appointing Murad Dadashov as its head. A caution on ownership is necessary, and this profile states it openly: recent monitoring could not document the present legal chain between SOCAR, its media public union and the licensed Khazar TV company, so the SOCAR connection is reported here as the historically documented position, not as a freshly verified share register.

STV Xazar: the Samanyolu years, 2000 to 2007

Xəzər TV was launched on 11 January 2000 as STV Xazar, the Azerbaijani feed of Samanyolu TV, simulcasting with the main Turkish feed. For seven years Azerbaijani viewers received a local window on a Turkish broadcaster's output, a common arrangement in the early post-Soviet market when foreign channels were retransmitted terrestrially in Azerbaijan. The STV period was not entirely passive: on 7 July 2006 a presentation ceremony was held in Baku's Ambassador Hotel for a documentary film about Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev made by STV, which was subsequently broadcast on the channel. The arrangement ended with a national policy change. Discussions on closing foreign television channels in Azerbaijan took place on 28 December 2006, the closures began in January 2007, Turkey's Kanal D was shut down, Russia's Channel One was removed on 11 July 2007, and the National Television and Radio Council urged STV Xazar to cease transmissions and sell its frequency. The Azerbaijani feed's days as a relay were over, and the question became who would hold the frequency as a domestic channel.

Winning the frequency and the relaunch of October 2007

The successor channel was registered on 3 August 2007. STV Xazar had been due to close on 10 July 2007, but closure was delayed while a competition for the frequency ran from 17 July, contested by Xazar TV, Antenn TV and Elm TV. Xazar TV was announced as the winner at a meeting of the National Television and Radio Council on 14 September 2007 and was granted a six-year licence to broadcast. The new channel was to prioritise educational and cultural programming and enlightenment content, and to distance itself from both the ruling government and the opposition without avoiding political affairs. Xazar TV was officially founded on 2 October 2007 and began transmissions the following day at 20:30, half an hour after STV Xazar ceased broadcasting. Initially its programming line was identical to its predecessor's, and founding director Asaf Hajiyev, the journalist who founded the channel in its current form, said it would temporarily air music and films as filler before moving to educational and cultural programming and news. It was officially launched on 5 October 2007 with the slogan Ailənizin Xəzəri.

Building a national audience: news style and daily series

What made Xəzər TV distinctive was presentation. Its news programme came to be considered unique in Azerbaijani television, offering niche reporting in a Turkish-styled presentation, a format judgement recorded in the IREX Media Sustainability Index and repeated in later reference summaries. Academic channel surveys describe the same formula from the audience side: Khazar TV began broadcasting in 2007 and became popular thanks to its unique presentation of news and the daily broadcast of television series. The channel also carried programming imported from Turkey and Japan alongside its domestic production. Entertainment, news and television series together formed its programming line, and the combination proved commercially powerful. As of January 2016, Xazar was ranked as the most-watched television channel in Azerbaijan according to AGB and Nielsen, and eight of the ten most-watched programmes in the country at that time were broadcast on Xazar TV. That 2016 measurement is the strongest documented audience evidence for the channel; no comparably sourced current ranking is published in the sources consulted here, and this profile does not project the 2016 figure forward as if it were current.

Headquarters in Baku White City and the move to HD

For its first decade and a half the channel operated from earlier Baku premises before consolidating in a purpose-inaugurated headquarters. Xazar TV inaugurated its new headquarters building in Baku White City, in the capital's Khatai district, on 30 December 2015 and moved there officially in February 2016. The building houses the Khazar Media Center, the structure through which the channel and its associated radio and digital services operate, and the center has entered public partnerships of its own, for example a cooperation with the State Employment Agency recorded in 2022. Technically, the channel's high-definition path was slower than planned. HD broadcasting via the Azerspace-1 satellite had been announced as forthcoming in December 2014 and was originally planned for 2015, but the National Television and Radio Council allocated frequencies for HD broadcasting to Xazar TV and Azad Azerbaijan TV only on 9 August 2017, and Xazar officially commenced HD broadcasts on 18 September 2017. The channel adopted a new logo in January 2023. Its website operates under xezertv.az, with a dedicated news brand, Xazar Xabar, attached to the same group.

The SOCAR acquisition of 2020 and the ownership caveat

On 5 March 2020 SOCAR acquired Xəzər TV, and Murad Dadashov was appointed as the new head of the channel; the channel's news director said at the time that the company's shares had passed under the control of SOCAR Media. Reference works accordingly list the channel's owner as SOCAR, through its media wing SOCAR Media Public Union, and group it with CBC TV and CBC Sport as sister channels. That is the documented position and it is reported here as such. However, a directory profile must also record the limits of the evidence. In its most recent review cycle the State Media Monitor removed SOCAR Media from its dataset because it could not establish the present legal chain: SOCAR Media is described as a public union, which under Azerbaijani law is a non-governmental, non-commercial membership organisation with founders or members rather than shareholders; its charter and governing records were not obtained; the regulator's records license Khazar TV and Khazar FM to Khazar TV LLC as a separate company; and no current shareholder record for that company was obtained. A later ownership study recorded Khazar TV's beneficial owner as unknown and emphasised the opacity of Azerbaijani broadcast ownership generally. The honest summary is that SOCAR's 2020 acquisition is well documented, while the channel's present formal ownership cannot be independently verified from public records.

Broadcast suspensions and regulatory record

Xəzər TV's regulatory record includes several short suspensions, which are a routine sanction in the Azerbaijani system and are recorded here factually. On 18 May 2020 its broadcasts were suspended for one hour, from 08:00 to 09:00, after the film Qəlb oğrusu included uncensored footage of tobacco use, in breach of guidance as found by the National Television and Radio Council. On 14 August 2020 the council ordered a further suspension, for three hours on 23 August, for airing advertisements for over sixteen minutes; ARB was ordered suspended for the same reason. On 9 July 2024 Xazar TV, alongside its radio sister Araz FM, temporarily suspended operations for eight hours as a preventive measure. In May 2023 the Audiovisual Council also issued Xazar TV LLC with a warning, alongside ATV, ARB and Dünya TV, over prohibited advertising of certain medical services broadcast in March and April 2023. None of these actions concerned the channel's news journalism, and none threatened its licence; they illustrate the detailed, content-level supervision to which all Azerbaijani national channels are subject.

Programming and editorial character

Xəzər TV's programming line includes entertainment, news, television series and other general content in Azerbaijani, broadcast nationwide terrestrially in Azerbaijan's digital system and by satellite and cable. Its identity rests on the pairing that made it market leader in the mid-2010s: a news service presented in a faster, Turkish-influenced visual style with niche reporting, and a prime-time spine of daily series that reliably delivered mass audiences. Media Landscapes groups Khazar with Lider, Space, ATV and ARB as the privately owned stations with national reach and pro-government views, and notes that Azerbaijani national channels in general give full coverage to the authorities while opposition views are largely absent from broadcast news. Xəzər TV is not an exception to that systemic description. At the same time, its founding licence commitments in 2007, to prioritise educational and cultural programming and to keep a distance from both government and opposition while not avoiding political affairs, remain part of its public record and a legitimate yardstick against which its later alignment can be measured.

Place in the Khazar Media Center group

The channel sits at the centre of the Khazar Media Center, the Baku White City structure that groups its television, radio and news operations. Reference listings name CBC Sport and CBC TV as sister channels through the SOCAR connection, and Araz FM appears in regulatory reporting as its radio sister, suspended alongside the television channel in July 2024. The regulator's records, as summarised by the State Media Monitor, license Khazar TV and Khazar FM to Khazar TV LLC and Araz FM to a separate Araz Teleradio LLC, a reminder that the group's public branding and its licensing structure do not map neatly onto one another. The center also acts as a corporate citizen in its own name, as in the 2022 cooperation with the State Employment Agency. For directory purposes the safest description is operational rather than legal: Xəzər TV is the flagship television service of the Khazar Media Center in Baku, historically acquired by SOCAR in 2020, with associated radio and news brands, in a market where formal ownership records for broadcasters are not publicly available.

Distribution and reach

Xəzər TV broadcasts nationwide across Azerbaijan, terrestrially in the digital multiplex system completed with the analogue switch-off of 20 December 2016, and via satellite, cable and online streaming. Television penetration in the country was recorded at 99 percent in 2014, and cable reached 28.1 percent of households in 2013, rising to 59.1 percent in Baku, so a national channel's potential audience is effectively the whole population. From 2021 the national channels, Xəzər TV among those listed, were carried again from the restored Shusha broadcasting station into Shusha, Khankendi, Khojaly, Aghdam and Barda districts and nearby settlements. Its HD service, launched in September 2017, placed it among the earlier Azerbaijani channels to offer a full high-definition feed, and its digital news operation under the Xazar Xabar brand extends its journalism beyond the broadcast schedule. Audience measurement beyond the January 2016 AGB and Nielsen ranking is not published in the sources consulted, and claims that the channel remains the single most-watched service today should be treated as unverified.

Assessment and current status

Xəzər TV remains in active operation as a nationwide Azerbaijani-language channel headquartered in Baku White City. Its historical significance is twofold: it was the domestic successor created when Azerbaijan ended terrestrial retransmission of foreign channels in 2007, converting the Samanyolu feed's frequency into a national channel under a licence that promised educational and cultural priorities, and it demonstrated in the 2010s that presentation, a Turkish-styled news format and daily domestic and imported series, could make a post-2007 channel the most-watched in the country, as measured in January 2016. The SOCAR acquisition of March 2020 placed it within the orbit of the state oil company's media interests alongside CBC TV and CBC Sport, although, as this profile has stated openly, the present legal ownership chain cannot be verified from public records and a recent ownership study lists its beneficial owner as unknown. For a directory reader, the essential facts are its 11 January 2000 origin as STV Xazar, its 5 October 2007 relaunch as Xəzər TV, its Baku White City base, its news and series-led general format, and its documented spell as Azerbaijan's most-watched channel.