History
The first television broadcasts in Saudi Arabia originated from a 200-watt television station, AJL-TV, "The Eye of the Desert". These were English-language programs for the personnel of the USAF Dhahran Airfield, and started on 17 June 1955. The programming was from contemporary American television, but all references to Christianity, Israel or alcohol were edited out. In September 1957, ARAMCO began a television service for its 9,000 employees in Dhahran.
For many years, Wahhabi clerics opposed the establishment of a national television service, as they believed it immoral to produce images of humans. The first national television broadcasts began in 1965, and the first broadcast was a recitation of the Quran. The introduction of television offended some Saudis, and one of King Faisal's nephews, Prince Khalid ibn Musa'id ibn 'Abd al-'Aziz, was killed in a police shootout in August 1965 after he led an assault on one of the new television stations.
Nawal Baksh was the first Saudi girl to appear on Saudi television, in 1966. After the 1979 Mecca siege, women were banned from television for a short time, after which written rules for Saudi television continued to include a ban on women appearing during Ramadan.
Prior to the introduction of satellite broadcasting, Saudi TV channels One and Two had a reach of 60% of the adult Saudi population. The exception was with regard to Eastern Province audiences who traditionally tuned in to Bahrain TV.
Arab satellite first became available in 1985 with the launching of Arabsat, but it was not until the 1990s that satellite television became commercially viable. Accessibility of Western entertainment and news programs had a profound effect, as the foreign telecast programs were instantly popular, leading Saudi TV to respond with more programs, including a live political talk show in which senior officials responded to questions by viewers.
The first private satellite channel in the Arab world, the Middle East Broadcasting Centre, was founded in 1991. In the early 1990s, King Fahd began to invest in the television business through Abdul Aziz Al Ibrahim and Khalid Al Ibrahim, the brothers of Al-Johara, his favourite wife. Other private channels soon followed, led for the most part by Saudis and Lebanese. By 2003, there were 15 private Arab satellite television channels, four of them owned by Saudis.
By the mid-2000s, many women presented shows on Saudi television. After trials in 2004 and 2005 in Jeddah, Digital Terrestrial Television launched in July 2006 and covered five major cities. To continue DTT transition and extend the service across the Kingdom, the Ministry of Culture and Information signed a contract with Thomson in May 2008. By 2010, its network of 100 digital terrestrial broadcasting towers covered nearly 90% of the population. However, probably due to the adoption of multichannel TV on satellite, the uptake of DTT remains limited; in 2012 it was estimated at 1% of total households.
Read more about this topic: Television In Saudi Arabia
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