Television in Greece

Television broadcasting in Greece began in 1966 and this was preceded in 1951 by statute 1663 permitting television broadcasting.

The two government channels, television being a government monopoly, during that period were ERT and YENED (for the military forces).

During the Greek military junta of 1967–74, television was used also for propagandistic reasons. The programme was a mixture of news and entertainment. A notable serial which still owns the watching record was the war drama O Agnostos Polemos (The Unknown War).

After the collapse of the Greek Junta in 1974, ERT continue to dominate, appealing to a much larger audience than YENED. Color television broadcasts began in the late 1970s. Notable people were placed to improve the quality of the national channels, such as Dimitris Horn, Manos Hatzidakis and the Nobel laureate poet Odysseas Elytis.

In 1982, ERT and YENED merged, forming "ERT" (Ellinikí Radiofonía Tileórasi), with ERT becoming "ERT1" and YENED becoming "ERT2". Broadcasts originally lasted for seven to eight hours daily starting at about 5:30PM with children shows and then the first televised news of the day. In 1987 an experimental teletext type information screen known as "Tilegrafos" (meaning televised words, i.e. telegraph) showed written information on ET2 during the afternoon. By the late 1980s, television broadcasts on ET1 and ET2 (still commonly known as ERT-1 and ERT-2 until later years) had increased to 12–15 hours daily, though it was still common for one or both stations to sign off briefly in the afternoon and sign back on in the early evening hours.

Some illegal broadcasts made short-lived appearances during the 1980s showing mainly movies of adult nature but, in 1987, the City of Thessaloniki began rebroadcasting in a TV frequency parts of European satellite channels, leading to a dispute between the government and the city, as the stations' equipment was confiscated numerous times. The more serious challenge to ERT's TV monopoly, however, appeared with the establishment and operation of TV Plus in the Athens/Piraeus area, which begun broadcasting major US films to the starved-for-diversity Athens public. It is then that ERT decided to pre-empt the challenge to its TV monopoly and any further attempts to put private broadcasts on the air, by re-broadcasting itself foreign satellite channels. In October 1988, the first of these satellite channels made it to the airwaves in Athens to block the frequency used by TV Plus, and as this by-now very popular TV station kept changing its frequency, more and more satellite channels were added by ERT to block the frequencies used by TV Plus. They included: NBC Europe from Great Britain, TV5Monde from France, Sat.1 from Germany, Rai 2 from Italy, and Horizon (from the former Soviet Union). These stations were soon followed by MTV Europe and Sky from the United Kingdom, while the broadcasts of Super Channel was taken over by TV Plus, due to the lack of an actual agreement with ERT. Sky eventually morphed into what is now known as Eurosport, which is still rebroadcast in Greece, and Euronews, Rai 1 and Cyprus SAT were eventually added to the lineup. For a short time, NBC Europe was also rebroadcast, as were RTL Plus from Germany and 3sat.

...
Wikipedia