TV channels Saint Lucia

Saint Lucia's television serves a single mountainous island - small in size, but with a channel that follows its national life throughout. The island changed hands between France and Britain fourteen times before becoming British for good in 1814, and it has been independent since 22 February 1979 - a history that left it English-speaking by law and creole-speaking at home.

The first station

Broadcasting began in December 1982, when the Helen Television System - named after Saint Lucia's old nickname, Helen of the West - started test transmissions as the country's first television station. Airing on channels 4 and 5, it mixed local programmes with relays from the United States, its news long leaning on material from the Government Information Services, and it showed that a market of under two hundred thousand people could sustain a television service of its own.

The island channel

DBS TV is the channel of the Saint Lucian lineup, serving the island with news, public affairs and community programming - from the capital Castries to the fishing villages and the banana country.

The station belongs to the Daher Broadcasting Service, a family company founded by a couple of Syrian origin that went on the air in the mid-1980s on VHF channel 10. It first built its name on relaying films, then made news and current affairs the core of its output, adding a radio arm to become a full network. DBS broadcasts in English, the official language, with occasional use of Kwéyòl, the French-based creole most Saint Lucians speak at home, and its signal reaches viewers over the air and through the island's cable systems.

Competition has kept the field lively: the pioneer HTS still broadcasts, and newer voices such as Choice TV, whose programming also reaches viewers in neighbouring Saint Vincent, give an island of Saint Lucia's size an unusually wide choice of home-grown television. Radio stations and a lively press fill out a media scene that has always punched above the island's weight.

From Independence Day in February to the Jazz and Arts Festival, the island's own channel keeps Saint Lucia watching itself.