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NTV Russia

NTV
НТВ
NTV logo 2003.svg
Launched 1993
Owned by Media-Most (1993–2001) Gazprom Media (2001–present)
Picture format 576i (SDTV)
1080i (HDTV)
Country Russian Federation
Broadcast area Worldwide
Headquarters Moscow, Russian Federation
Formerly called 1967–1976: Program 4
1976–1984: Network 4
1984–1991: National Channel 4
1991 – 1993-10-10: Channel 4 Ostankino
Website ntv.ru
Availability
Terrestrial
Russian Analogue Normally tuned to 4
Russian digital MUX 1
Streaming media

NTV (Cyrillic: НТВ) is a Russian television channel that was launched as a subsidiary of Vladimir Gusinsky's company Media-Most (). Since April 14, 2001, Gazprom Media has controlled NTV. NTV has no official meaning according to Igor Malashenko, the author of the name and co-founder of the company, but in the 1990s unofficial transcripts of the acronym include "New" (Novoye), "Independent" (Nezavisimoye), "Non-governmental" (Negosudarstvenoye), "Our" (Nashe).

Vladimir Gusinsky founded NTV in 1993, attracting talented journalists and news anchors of the time such as Tatiana Mitkova, Leonid Parfyonov, Mikhail Osokin, Yevgeniy Kiselyov, Vladimir A. Kara-Murza, Victor Shenderovich and others. The channel set high professional standards in Russian television, broadcasting live coverage and sharp analysis of current events. Starting before the dissolution of Soviet Union as Fourth Programme, the channel broadcast a daily news programme Today and a weekly news-commentary programme Itogi. In the early 1990s, Video International (), a multibillion-dollar advertising agency, obtained exclusive advertising rights on NTV.

It commented favorably on President Boris Yeltsin's re-election campaign in 1996.

By 1999 NTV had achieved an audience of 102 million, covering about 70% of Russia's territory, and was available in other former Soviet republics.

During parliamentary elections in 1999 and presidential elections in 2000, NTV was critical of the Second Chechen War, Vladimir Putin and the political party Unity backed by him. In the puppet show Kukly in the beginning of February 2000, the puppet of Putin acted as Little Zaches in a story based on E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Little Zaches called Cinnabar", in which blindness causes villagers mistake an evil gnome for a beautiful youth. This provoked a fierce reaction from Putin's supporters. On 8 February the newspaper Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti published a letter signed by the Rector of St. Petersburg State University Lyudmila Verbitskaya, the Dean of its Law Department Nikolay Kropachyov and some of Putin's other presidential campaign assistants that urged the prosecution of the authors of the show for what they considered a criminal offence.


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