TV channels Bahamas

Bahamian television pairs the national broadcaster with a talk-radio voice: one state channel has long been the shared screen of an archipelago of some seven hundred islands.

From hurricane warnings to television

Broadcasting in the Bahamas began on the radio: ZNS - the call letters stand for Zephyr Nassau Sunshine - was founded in 1937 to carry hurricane warnings across the archipelago, broadcasting two hours a day with news and music from BBC and Nassau sources, and later adding a transmitter in Freeport on Grand Bahama. Television arrived only in 1977, when the national broadcaster's television service launched in Nassau on New Providence; until then, Bahamian viewers had watched American stations for decades. Colour broadcasting began in 1983.

The national broadcaster

ZNS-TV is the television arm of the Broadcasting Corporation of the Bahamas, the state broadcaster in Nassau. Its two transmitters, serving Nassau and Freeport, are the country's only over-the-air television stations; viewers elsewhere in the archipelago receive the channel through Cable Bahamas, the company founded in 1995 that held the exclusive cable licence until 2009. The station's early decades mixed sitcoms, sport, drama and films, before it turned to public-affairs programming in 1992. A major restructuring of the corporation in 2010, much debated at the time, prepared its transition toward a public-service model, and a digital terrestrial conversion plan followed in 2011. The same corporation also runs the national ZNS radio services in Nassau and Freeport.

Talk

Guardian Talk Radio brings the talk and news conversation of the Nassau Guardian's radio voice to the screen. Its parent, The Nassau Guardian, has been publishing since 1844, and Guardian Radio 96.9 FM premiered in April 2012 as the country's first all-news-and-talk station: its call-in schedule - politics, business, health, community questions - turned radio talk into a daily national forum, one whose cameras now bring it to television as well.

Beyond the state signal, private stations such as JCN Channel 14 and Our TV serve Nassau, while cable brings in the wider American and Caribbean dial - and the national conversation still runs through ZNS and the talk shows of Nassau.