A map showing when television was introduced in each country:
1939 and before
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s and 2010s
2020s and after
No television
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This is a list of when the first publicly announced television broadcasts occurred in the mentioned countries. Non-public field tests and closed circuit demonstrations are not included.
This list should not be interpreted to mean the whole of a country had television service by the specified date. For example, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the former Soviet Union all had operational television stations and a limited number of viewers by 1939. Very few cities in each country had television service. Television broadcasts were not yet available in most places.
Free City of Danzig (electronic, experimental),[a]Poland (mechanical, experimental), (Doświadczalna Stacja Telewizyjna),[16]Peru (pre-experimental), Chile (pre-experimental)
^Although 180-line cathode ray tube receivers were manufactured in France in 1936, a mechanical scanning camera was still used at the transmitter in Paris until 1937.
^Off from 1940 to 1950 due to Japan's entry in the World War II and subsequent US occupation.
^Off from 1939 to 1945 during World War II. The service reached the entirety of the Russian SSR alone by the late 1960s.
^License auctioned to Silvio Santos and became SBT São Paulo in 1981.
^License auctioned to Organizações Bloch in 1983 and became TV Manchete Rio de Janeiro, now RedeTV! Rio.
^Station broadcast in English from its launch to shutdown in 1954, as a consequence of the FCC freeze, which was lifted at the time of closure.
^Licensed to Altzomoni, in the neighboring State of Mexico.
^Limited to Istanbul. Ankara got television in 1968 when TRT started its television service. In 1971, ITU TV shut down and TRT started a station in Istanbul. From then on, a slow process to start a national service began.
^Dutch-languageBRT used the Belgian 625-line standard and French-languageRTB used the Belgian 819-line standard (abandoned in 1963). Early Belgian sets were very expensive because they could receive four different standards: Belgian 625, European 625, Belgian 819, French 819. Later a fifth standard was added with the French 625-line standard.
^Rollout for NHK started in 1953 in Kanto, 1954 in Tokai and Kansai and between 1956 and 1958 for the rest of Japan. For commercial TV, limited to Kanto from 1953 to 1955 (NTV and KRT) and spread between 1956 and 1963 to the rest of the country. Saga Prefecture only gained television (NHK and commercial) in 1969 due to overspill from neighboring prefectures and usage of UHF as the preferred band.
^English-language station affiliated to American networks (with an independent phase) until 2015, when it became a Canal 5 affiliate.
^Telesaar went defunct in 1958 as it was ordered by the German authorities.
^First television broadcasts in the island of Ireland, eight years before the Republic. Local programmes started in 1955.
^License auctioned to Organizações Bloch in 1983 and became TV Manchete Minas, now RedeTV! Minas.
^ abThe channel launched in 1956 as a continuation of a project that had aired a public broadcast in May 1955 as the first television broadcast in Finland.[27]
^Television was introduced in Hong Kong when it was a British crown colony until 1997. The Rediffusion service was a cable network until 1973, when it converted to terrestrial television.
^This station was the first in the Chinese world to be strictly terrestrial from the outset.
^Originally limited to Tehran area, later to Abadan, and from 1969, expanded to the whole nation. Television of Iran was absorbed into National Iranian Television in 1969; since the main network of the NIRT used a different frequency from TVI (which used channel 3) in Tehran, it's likely that the former TVI frequency was turned off.
^Wales had received broadcasts from England since 1952.
^License auctioned to Silvio Santos in 1981 and became SBT RS.
^Until the launch of the first version of Telenorte in Antofagasta in 1966, television was limited to central Chile (Santiago and Valparaíso). The definitive roll-out of television outside of this region didn't start until late 1968, when TVN set up its first station in Arica months before it started definitive broadcasts, though in 1969, most of its network was concentrated in central Chile.
^Station shut down in 1972. The frequency was later occupied by Teleamazonas starting in 1974. RTS is often erroneously believed to be the first.
^Television was introduced in the Ryukyu Islands (now part of Japan), when they were under U.S. administration.
^License auctioned to Organizações Bloch in 1983 and became TV Manchete Ceará (signed on 1984), now RedeTV! Ceará.
^The United Arab Republic was a short-lived political union between Egypt and Syria. The union began in 1958 and existed until 1961, when Syria seceded from the union.
^License auctioned to Silvio Santos in 1981 and became SBT Pará.
^Ireland had received broadcasts from the United Kingdom since 1949.
^Gibraltar had previously received television broadcasts from Spain.
^Originally limited to Jakarta area, and from 1965, the island of Java as a whole. The first television station outside of the island, TVRI North Sumatera, opened in 1970, after receiving just overspill coming from West Malaysia.
^ abPreviously received television broadcasts from Italy.
^Originally limited to most areas of Peninsular Malaysia.
^ abStation operated autonomously by the territorial production center of Televisión Española (TVE) in the region.
^Considering the current territory of the state, the first TV station is TV Centro América, founded in 1967. The area where TV Morena is became its own state, Mato Grosso do Sul, in 1979.
^Although the Isle of Man has received television signals since 1951, 1965 marked the first direct broadcast from a relay station built on the island. To date, no local television service has been set up and the island is served by BBC North West and ITV Granada (until 2009, ITV Border) with no local opt-outs.
^Experimental broadcasts started in 1963; the station claims 1966 to be its birth year, when broadcasts became regular.
^The Israeli Ministry of Education in co-operation with the Rothschild Fund started limited broadcasts to schools in March 1966. A public state-owned TV channel started broadcasting in May 1968. Broadcasts were black and white (with a few exceptions) until the early 1980s.
^Successor of the prior RTV service in Lusaka, which started in 1961.
^SLTV relayed television broadcasts from Barbados.
^Excludes TV Florianópolis, a television station that existed between 1964 and 1965, and was shut down after four months on air by DENTEL on the grounds that it lacked a license.
^Cable service. Dominica never had a terrestrial television service. Its monopoly in the market was broken in the early 80s by Marpin Telecoms, which is currently Digicel Dominica.
^Replaced a cable company set up in 1975 when it was still under the control of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands and was shut down due to storm surges from a hurricane in 1979.
^Test service available only in Yangon in 1979, and formally launched in 1981.
^Available only in Colombo in the network's early years.
^Had received broadcasts from Singapore since 1963.
^Only bantustan within Apartheid-era South Africa to have a local television service. After the dissolution of Bophuthatswana, the station was integrated into the SABC and later shut down.
^Television is available from Nong Khai city in Thailand since the mid-1970s.
^Off from 1991 to 2011 as the channel was suspended due to the civil war. During the interim, numerous private television stations appeared.
^Subscription service, shut down in 1987, during its existence it also faced competition from ASTL-TV3, itself a subscription service until the 1991 launch of the Oceania Broadcasting Network, ASTL-TV3 later shut down in 1996.
^Although the Vatican did not have a television service of its own until 1983, broadcasts from Italy had been received since 1954.
^A prior service existed during the brief Argentine takeover of the islands in the Falklands War in 1982, sustained by ATC.
^Assets sold to the government of Niue in 1989 and converted to a free-to-air terrestrial operation, TV Niue.
^Television broadcasts had also been received from Argentina.
^Television came to Fiji in part-time for the 1991 Rugby World Cup, and it arrived in full-time in 1994.
^ATV's origins trace back to the early 90s as an opt-out in the local relay of TVC's second channel, Canal 33.
^Sporadic broadcasts in association with a local Francophone cable channel in 1993. Start of the German-language service. Excludes German TV received by overspill and cable and the adjacent services from RTBF in French.
^Excluding the cable network installed by the PNCC in 1990.
^Liechtenstein previously received television broadcasts from Switzerland.
^RASD TV was established in February 2004, but didn't broadcast its regular transmissions until 2009.
^Became the national broadcaster upon independence in 2011.
^ abExcludes local stations that existed before and were confiscated by the new regimes. Suspilne still has channels for the occupied areas, which as of 2024 are "temporarily occupied" according to the official stance of the Ukrainian government.
^1937 RCA Publicity Photographs. "Eighty-seven video programs were telecast by NBC last year," "Where Is Television Now?Archived 2008-09-13 at the Wayback Machine", Popular Mechanics, August 1938, p. 178. Regularly scheduled electronic broadcasts began in April 1938 in New York (to the second week of June, and resuming in August) and Los Angeles. "Telecasts Here and Abroad," The New York Times, April 24, 1938, Drama-Screen-Radio section, p. 10; "Early Birds," Time, June 13, 1938; "Telecasts to Be Resumed," The New York Times, Aug. 21, 1938, Drama-Screen-Radio section, p. 10; Robert L. Pickering, "Eight Years of Television in California," California – Magazine of the Pacific, June 1939. Also note that many rural areas of the Southern United States didn't receive television until the late 1950s and early 1960s.
