Television
Cambodia launched a test television station, its call sign is XUTV, which began broadcasting in 1966. The station was part of state-owned Radio dffusion Nationale Khmere in 1970, operating 12 to 14 hours daily, with advertising as its primary income. Its studios were destroyed by the Khmer Rouge in 1975, halting the role of television during the Khmer Rouge era.
In 1983, the government launched another station, TVK, under the Vietnamese-backed People's Republic of Kampuchea regime. It began broadcasting in color from 1986. There was only one station until the late 1990s, when private companies began to launch their own stations.
All of these stations have local programming, including serials, variety shows and game shows. Thai soap operas (dubbed in Khmer) were extremely popular, until a backlash following the 2003 Phnom Penh riots, after which Thai programs were banned.
Cable television, including UBC programming from Thailand as well as other satellite networks, is also widely available in Cambodia. Many people in Cambodia do not watch Cambodia-produced television, instead applying for UBC from Thailand to view Thai programs. Cambodians living abroad can watch Khmer television content via Thaicom from Thailand, Myanmar, and Vietnam.
Most television networks in Cambodia shut down in the evening. Since 2008, the government have allowed TV channels to close at 12.00 a.m. (midnight) and resume at 6.00 a.m..
Read more about this topic: Media Of Cambodia
Famous quotes containing the word television:
“... there is no reason to confuse television news with journalism.”
—Nora Ephron (b. 1941)
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“So why do people keep on watching? The answer, by now, should be perfectly obvious: we love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist. In fact, deep in their hearts, this is what the spuds crave most: a rich, new, participatory life.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)