Yle - History

History

Yleisradio was founded in Helsinki on 29 May 1926. The first radio programme was transmitted on 9 September in that year, and this is the date generally considered to be the birthday of regular broadcasting activities in Finland. However, it was not until 1928 that Yle's broadcasts became available throughout the country. After this the broadcasting network was developed and by the beginning of the 1930s, 100,000 households were able to listen Yle's programmes.

In 1957 Yle made its first television broadcast tests, and the following year regular TV programming was started under the name Suomen Televisio (Finnish Television). The popularity of television in the country grew rapidly and in 1964, Yle obtained TES-TV and Tamvisio, which were merged to Yle TV2. Colour television broadcasts began in 1969 and broadcasts were fully in colour within ten years. During the past few years, Yle has founded a number of new radio and television channels and in 2007 there was a digital television switchover. A completely new digital channel Yle Teema was introduced, and the Swedish-language FST (Finlands Svenska Television) was moved from reserved analogue channel time to its own digital channel Yle FST5 (now Yle Fem). Five channels were reserved, where the fifth channel was initially used for 24-hour news (Yle24). However, this channel was decommissioned, and the replacement, Yle Extra, was also decommissioned in 2007. Until August 4, 2008, the fifth channel was used to broadcast Yle TV1 with Finnish subtitles broadcast on programmes in foreign languages (without having to enable the digital set-top box's subtitle function).