Czech TV and Radio

Missing the sights and sounds of home or just in need of some down time? Expats.cz looks at the TV and radio options available in the Czech Republic.

With so many people online nowadays, traditional TV and radio, especially among expats, is mostly in decline. Why wait for your favorite show when you can get it off the net? As for music, well a certain frowned upon activity ensures people are keeping up with the latest tunes or getting their favorites wherever they are. But from time to time, you might want to just switch on the tube or find some background noise, or the day’s news. How can you do that here?

The two public stations, Česká Televize 1 (ČT1) and Česká Televize 2 (ČT2) charge a license fee to TV viewers. This is the stations’ main form of revenue. According to the law, this payment is required for one or more televisions or radios a person has regardless of its purpose.

The radio license fee is 45 CZK a month for households with one device, additional devices are not charged. For businesses and people with business licenses, the fee is 45 CZK per item. For TV the fee is 135 CZK. The same conditions for businesses and business people apply for radios as for TV.

Unless you´re quite adept at Czech or planning on learning, you might have trouble viewing the aforementioned stations. The four standard TV channels; ČT1, ČT2, Nova and Prima offer few viewing options for English speakers. The best option is the film club on ČT2. The current time slot is Sunday nights. Check your TV guide for features and times.

The advent of digital broadcasting in the Czech Republic will present a slight increase in choice. There are four types of digital transmission: terrestrial, satellite, cable and internet. There are also plans to release TV for mobile phones later this year. Though all the forms are digital transmission, you will need a different set-top box to pick up the different kinds, except of course terrestrial, which can also be received on a digital TV.

One piece of good news is that digital transmissions do not require a new antenna because analogue and digital are both transmitted on the UHF bandwidth. Of course, the size and position of the antenna will determine picture quality just as it did in the good old days and though the old antenna might pick up the digital signals, you need either a set-top box or digital TV to display them.

One of the main advantages of digital TV for expats is the opportunity to receive TV shows in the original form, i.e. not dubbed. At the moment, there are no transmissions in English, but the stations expect it in the future.

Even better than the terrestrial channels is the digital satellite provider, DigiTV. The basic package it offers includes 46 channels, of which 16 are in English. These channels include MTV Europe, Discovery, CNN, Eurosport and the Cartoon Network. Sadly, the film channels are dubbed. For those of you who want to watch programs in languages other than English or Czech, the station has channels in Hungarian, Romanian, French and Slovakian, just to name a few.

The third type of digital TV available is digital cable. And yes, you will require a separate receiver for this as well. As with digital terrestrial and digital satellite, the main advantage is the vast increase in the number of channels available, from 40 to 300.