Europa TV

Europa TV was a consortium of five European public service broadcasters from West Germany (ARD), Ireland (RTÉ), Italy (RAI), the Netherlands (NOS) and Portugal (RTP).

Development
Europa TV aspired to be pan-European not only with regard to its geographical reach but also its programming content. It came after the Eurikon experiment in 1982, that consisted on the production of an experimental television service which over a period of five weeks, was distributed in closed-circuit format.

The channel was financed through contributions from the Dutch government, the European Commission, the participating broadcast organizations and through advertising revenues within its initial three-year budget was 30 million ECUs. Europa TV studios were located in Hilversum in the Netherlands, and Klaas Jan Hindriks was appointed as general manager.

Operation
Europa TV started its transmissions on 5 October 1985 and initially only available in the Netherlands, which expanded its reach to 4.5 million households across Europe via ESA and Eutelsat's ECS-1 satellite. This included access to 1.5 million households in Portugal where it was transmitted terrestrially on RTP2 (in other countries the signal was also distributed by cable).

To overcome language barriers, Europa TV transmitted on several sound channels within facilities for simultaneous translation (in English, Dutch, German and Portuguese) enabled audiences to receive the channel in their native tongue. In addition, subtitling in different languages was provided through teletext.

All of the co-operating broadcasters sent in their programmes to Europa TV, but some were produced especially for the channel. These included weather forecasts (covering EEC countries such as Norway, Sweden and Finland but excluding East Germany), current affairs (ex: Worldwatch) and music programmes (ex: Countdown, presented by Adam Curry).

Closure
On 29 November 1986, it was forced to cease operations having already exhausted its initial three-year budget.

Preservation
The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision started ongoing preservation efforts of Europa TV broadcasts on 29 August 2018, recovering recordings from about 300 VHS tapes from their archives, 400 Betamax tapes from RTP and documents from RTÉ, RAI and Klaas Jan Hindriks.