The Estonian Ministry of Culture has announced a public contest for a nationwide FTA digital television licence.
The main requirements are diverse programming, at least 12 hours daily, in the Estonian language; the inclusion of culture, entertainment, news, youth, children’s programming, feature and documentary films; the allocation of at least 90 minutes each month to new audiovisual works produced by financial support of the state of Estonia; and the inclusion of at least half of the daily news limit within the prime time hours of 7-11pm.
Service providers interested in submitting an application to the ministry are requested to do so by March 14.
At present Estonia has four FTA channels, namely the public broadcaster’s two (ETV and ETV2) and the commercial services Kanal-2 and TV3, operated by Schibsted and MTG/Viasat respectively.