TV channels Niger

Niger's television is a field where the national broadcaster reaches one of the largest territories in Africa - and where a second public channel arrived to serve its towns.

How television came to Niger

Niger was one of the first African countries south of the Sahara to have television. In 1964, Télé-Niger began as an experimental school channel - a fifty-watt transmitter in Niamey serving about twenty classrooms - and the experiment grew to 120 schools with stronger transmitters in Niamey and Dosso. When French funding for the school service ended, a trial broadcast of the 1978 football World Cup convinced the authorities to go national: on 6 April 1979 the colour channel Tele Sahel began, broadcasting four days a week, and a chain of transmitters - Birni N'Konni, Maradi, Zinder and Tahoua, then Diffa, Agadez, Arlit, Ingall and Gaya - brought the service to some eighty percent of the population by 1982. Daily broadcasts came in November 1988.

The national service

Tele Sahel remains Niger's national television service, carrying news and public affairs in French and the country's national languages, from Niamey to Agadez and Zinder - in a country where radio still travels furthest, the television channel is the public square of the towns. It belongs to the public broadcasting office founded in 1967 as the ORTN - since 2022 the Radio Télévision du Niger, with transmission entrusted to a separate public operator.

The second channel

Tal TV is the public broadcaster's second channel, launched on 18 December 2001 - Republic Day - as the liberalised media climate demanded a service closer to its viewers: its mission names young people and women as its public, under the motto 'Jeunesse, Proximité, Dynamisme', and its signal covers Niamey and its surroundings.

Beyond the public pair, the private field is mostly radio - more than a hundred private stations and a dense network of community radios, with the BBC's Hausa service heard on FM in the south - but private television exists too, led by Dounia TV, the country's first non-governmental television news voice, and Tenere TV.

From the Cure Salée festival of the herders to the sessions of the National Assembly, Niger's channels serve a vast Sahelian country where broadcasting is the thread between distant communities.