TV channels Namibia

Namibia's television is young by continental standards - it grew up alongside independence - and today mixes the national public service with a private entertainment voice.

How television came to Namibia

The first broadcasts came in October 1981, when the South West African Broadcasting Corporation opened a television service reaching about half the population through eleven transmitters; nine tenths of the schedule came from or via South Africa's SABC. Independence in 1990 turned the service into the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation, and three months later NBC television switched entirely to English, the new official language. The choice was revisited from 2000, when news in local languages was added after it became clear that most viewers did not understand English - and a short weekday slot still serves the German-speaking community.

For a huge, sparsely populated country, television became the thread connecting Windhoek with the towns of the coast and the north. The NBC held a monopoly on free-to-air television until 2008, when the privately owned One Africa Television launched, and digital terrestrial broadcasting followed in 2013, giving the public broadcaster three channels; the flagship NBC1 is also carried on satellite subscription platforms. Radio completes the map of the country's communities: alongside its national English service, the NBC runs nine language services, from Oshiwambo and Otjiherero to Afrikaans and German.

Music and entertainment

Tjil TV is the entertainment voice of the lineup, carrying music and the lighter side of Namibian screens. It belongs to Namibia Media Holdings, the Windhoek publishing house behind the Namibian Sun, the Afrikaans-language Republikein and the German-language Allgemeine Zeitung, which grew its tjil entertainment brand into a television platform devoted to Namibian arts, music, fashion and pop culture. Local videos, artist interviews and event coverage sit at the centre of the schedule - a private, youth-oriented counterpoint to the public channels. In 2026 the platform named the journalist and presenter Ester Kamati as its executive director, a sign of its ambitions in Namibian entertainment.

From independence anniversaries to the life of the regions, Namibia's channels cover a country twice the size of Germany with a fraction of its population.