RTBF


The Radio-télévision belge de la Communauté française is a public-service broadcasting organisation delivering radio and television services to the French-speaking Community of Belgium, in Wallonia and Brussels. Its counterpart in the Flemish Community is the Dutch-language VRT, and in the German-speaking Community it is BRF.
RTBF operates five television channels – La Une, La Deux, La Trois, Arte Belgique and PureVision together with a number of radio channels, La Première, RTBF International, VivaCité, Musiq3, Classic 21, and PureFM.
The organisation's headquarters in Brussels, which is shared with VRT, is sometimes referred to colloquially as Reyers. This comes from the name of the avenue where RTBF/VRT's main building is located, the Boulevard Auguste Reyers.

History

Originally named the Belgian National Broadcasting Institute, the state-owned broadcasting organization was established by law on 18 June 1930. On 14 June 1940 the INR was forced to cease broadcasting as a result of the German invasion. The German occupying forces, who now oversaw its management, changed the INR's name to Radio Bruxelles. A number of INR personnel were able to relocate to the BBC's studios in London from where they broadcast as Radio Belgique / Radio België under the Office de Radiodiffusion Nationale Belge established by the Belgian government in exile's Ministry of Information.
At the end of the war the INR and the RNB coexisted until 14 September 1945, when a Royal Decree merged the two and restored the INR's original mission. The INR was one of 23 broadcasting organizations which founded the European Broadcasting Union in 1950. Television broadcasting from Brussels began in 1953, with two hours of programming each day. In 1960 the INR was subsumed into RTB and moved to new quarters at the Reyers building in 1967. RTB's first broadcast in colour, Le Jardin Extraordinaire, was transmitted in 1971. Two years later, RTB began broadcasting news in colour.
In 1977, broadcasting became a concern for Belgium's language communities, rather than the national government as a whole. Accordingly, the French-language section of RTB became RTBF and a second television channel was set up with the name RTbis. In 1979 RTbis became Télé 2. Along with French channels TF1, France 2, France 3 and Swiss channel TSR, RTBF jointly established the European French-speaking channel TV5Monde in 1984. On 21 March 1988, Télé 2 became Télé 21. On 27 September 1989 a subsidiary company of RTBF was set up with the name Canal Plus TVCF, which subsequently became Canal Plus Belgique in May 1995. In 1993, Télé 21 was replaced by Arte/21 and Sport 21.
In mid January 2010, RTBF became RTBF.be. The change was made because of the growing importance of new media. The '.be' suffix stresses these new developments. RTBF.be underlines that this change isn't anecdotal and that the internet has gained its place in the media landscape, just as TV and radio have done years ago.
On 11 June 2013, RTBF was one of the few European public broadcasters to join in condemning the closure of Greece's public broadcaster ERT.
By 2011, the analogue systems for RTBF.be were planned to be phased out for Wallonia.

Television channels

Television channels are transmitted:
The VOD, Video on demand offer of the RTBF is available on several platforms:
The RTBF broadcasts radio channels in either analogue format. All channels are also broadcast live over the Internet.

Analogue and digital

Digital-only channels

They also have a TMC service transmitted on Classic 21.

''Bye Bye Belgium''

On 13 December 2006, at 20:21 CET, RTBF replaced an edition of its regular current affairs programme Questions à la Une with a fake special news report in which it was claimed that Flanders had proclaimed independence, effectively dissolving the Belgian state. The programme had been preceded by a caption reading "This may not be fiction", which was repeated intermittently as a subtitle to the images on screen. After the first half-hour of the 90-minute broadcast, however – by which point RTBF.be's response line had been flooded with calls – this was replaced with a caption reading "This is fiction".
The video featured images of news reporters standing in front of the Flemish Parliament, while Flemish separatists waved the flag of Flanders behind them. Off to the side, Francophone and Belgian nationalists were waving Belgian flags. The report also featured footage of King Albert and Queen Paola getting on a military jet to Congo, a former Belgian colony.
RTBF justified the hoax on the grounds that it raised the issue of Flemish nationalism, but others felt that it raised the issue of about how much the public can trust the press.