Alfa TV, an international satellite channel being set up by 25 countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, is due to start test broadcasts from Budapest in March 1998. The channel, which is being financed initially by European Community institutions and private sponsors, will have a potential audience estimated at 400 million viewers, and hopes eventually to become self-financing. Peter Feuilherade of the BBC Monitoring's Foreign Media Unit reports:

The channel, which has the backing of the European Parliament and more than 30 European broadcasters involved in the Eureka Audiovisuel media assistance project, intends to broadcast news, business programmes promoting investment opportunities in the region, and films and other cultural programmes to a potential audience estimated at 400 million viewers, from Finland to Azerbaijan.

Initially, the channel plans to offer simultaneous broadcasts in eight languages, and to dub programmes into more languages in the future.

The Alfa TV project was proposed back in 1994 by Josef von Ferenczy, a German media entrepreneur of Hungarian origin, who saw the multilingual channel as a vehicle "to promote cooperation and reconciliation" in Central and Eastern Europe "in a manner that is, hopefully, free from politics".

The channel will probably not be launched before 1999, according to reports from Hungarian sources this month.

Alfa is intended to be a public TV channel, emphasizing European cultural and intellectual values and eventually becoming financially self-sufficient, its organizers say.

So far, some 6m US dollars have been spent on setting up Alfa TV's Budapest headquarters, with more than half that sum coming from the Hungarian government.

The European Parliament has provided 10 per cent of the start-up costs and promised more funding.

The channel will also seek sponsorship from private capital and boost its income by carrying advertising.

One of Alfa TV's stated aims is to transmit a significant number of programmes bought from politically independent programme-makers, and also to act as a showcase for films produced in its member-countries.

Given its inter-regional nature, the planned new channel has been compared to Euronews, the multilingual channel of European public broadcasters based in the French city of Lyon.

Alfa, however, intends to place greater emphasis on culture.

"It wants to provide viewers in the region with an alternative to the flood of American culture," the Czech news agency CTK reported in November 1997.

But offering high-quality cultural programming with a European flavour will not protect Alfa TV from the commercial pressures of having to lure viewers away from the increasing range of television fare on offer from both state and commercial broadcasters in the expanding markets of its member-countries.

Euronews has had to operate at a financial loss since its launch in 1993, relying on funding from the EU and individual governments.

Alfa TV, when it eventually launches, is likely to have to rely largely on the generosity of sponsorship from European institutions as well as private donors such as the New York-based billionaire financier and philanthropist George Soros.

By the time Alfa TV eventually comes on air, TV journalists in many of its member countries in Eastern Europe and the FSU will already have had many years of experience of competing in a developing market and trying to produce material that will attract and retain viewers.

But in those countries where the pace of media liberalization has been slower and the influence of the state remains strong, the new channel could act as a catalyst by exposing journalists, as well as viewers, to better news reporting and a wider range of programming content, styles and formats, and so help to speed up the pace of change in the TV sector.

BBC Monitoring (http://www.monitor.bbc.co.uk), based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.
 

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