Television in Belgium

Television in Belgium was introduced in 1953 and began with one channel each in Dutch and French.

The three Belgian Communities – Dutch, French and German-speaking – have legal responsibility for audiovisual communication. They constitute separate markets, the common feature of which is the fact that they have been extensively cabled for three decades and are thus able to receive neighbouring countries' channels.

Until 1978, Radio-Television Belgium (Dutch: Belgische Radio- en Televisieomroep; French: Radio-Télévision Belge) was Belgium's national public television broadcaster. When broadcasting was devolved to the language communities in 1977, the old organization split into three separate organisations now known as VRT, RTBF and BRF respectively. VRT and RTBF share broadcasting facilities in Brussels, while BRF operates from Eupen.

There are no national TV channels in Belgium. Because of the language divide there are only channels either in Dutch or French, there is no single company operating TV channels in both the Flemish as the French part. Media laws are created and controlled on a regional level (Flemish or French). Thus the Flemish channels are controlled by Flemish law and the French speaking ones are controlled by the French community. The public broadcasters still share a building in Brussels, a leftover from the time when the Public Television was still a national (Belgian) competence, however they have split operations altogether with French language broadcaster RTBF occupying the right half of the building and Flemish broadcaster VRT occupying the left half of the building. They are both governed by different law and a different parliament an example of this is the fact that the French languages public broadcaster RTBF is allowed to sell advertising on television and have actual ad breaks, while the Flemish public broadcaster can only sell product placement and sponsor billboards on television. On their radio channels both are allowed to sell full ad breaks. Both public broadcasters also work in a completely different competitive environment.

The two main Belgian public TV networks, VRT in the Flemish Community and RTBF in the French Community of Belgium, broadcast their channels via operators using cable, satellite, IPTV and terrestrial television. The Belgian commercial TV stations are currently only available on cable, satellite and IPTV. Terrestrial broadcasting is limited to public service TV stations because of the high adoption rate of cable (95%) in Belgium which makes it unnecessary to broadcast commercially.

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