Yleisradio Oy (; ), abbreviated as Yle (; formerly styled in all uppercase until 2012), translated into English as the Finnish Broadcasting Company, is Finland's national public broadcasting company. Founded as a private enterprise in 1926 and nationalised in 1934, Yle is governed by an administrative council elected by the Parliament of Finland and is structured as a limited company, 99.98% of which is owned by the Finnish state. It employs around 3,000 people in Finland.
Yle operates three national television channels, eight radio services, 23 regional radio stations, a multilingual website, and a multimedia streaming platform. As Finland is constitutionally bilingual—around 5.5% of the population speaks Swedish as their native language—Yle provides content in Swedish through its Swedish-language department, Svenska Yle. Additional content is provided in three Sámi languages and in several other languages.
Yle is primarily funded by an annual tax assessed on Finnish citizens and corporations (the Yle tax). Yle receives no advertising revenue, as all of its services are advertisement-free. In 2025, Yle's annual revenue was about €550 million.
Yle is a founding member of both the European Broadcasting Union and Nordvision, and was also a member of the International Radio and Television Organisation. In 2007, Yle hosted the Eurovision Song Contest in Helsinki.
History
The beginning (Finland's General Radio) was founded in Helsinki on 29 May 1926 following more than a year of planning by a commission formed among public and private entities to bring public broadcasting to Finland. The name was taken from the Finnish Defence Forces, where the term meant a radio broadcast that could be heard by everyone. The first programme was broadcast on 9 September 1926 from a studio at Unioninkatu 20 using assets purchased the day before from a radio station operated by (the Finnish Radio Association), an advocacy group that had been promoting radio in Finland since 1923. The initial programme contained brief opening remarks in both Finnish and Swedish, followed by music. Daily scheduled broadcasting began on 1 December 1926 with programming between 12:00–13:00 and 18:00–22:00 (17:00–22:00 on Sundays); two evenings per week were dedicated to Swedish programming, with the rest of the schedule in Finnish. Yleisradio broadcast the first radio church service from Tampere Cathedral on September 12, 1926; it is the oldest program still running on Yleisradio.
Before Yle, radio broadcasts in Finland had been made periodically by entrepreneurial organisations and amateur radio clubs such as in Helsinki from 23 March 1924 and (the Tampere Radio Association) in April 1924. The radio battalion of the Finnish Defence Forces had also established a medium wave (AM band) radio station in Katajanokka at the former Russian Empire Baltic Fleet officer casino (now Katajanokka Casino) in April 1923. Yle's management initially decided to use this site to transmit programming to the Helsinki region, continuing a practice begun by the Finnish Radio Association. Yle transmitted from here until 1930, when a new transmitter was constructed elsewhere in Helsinki.
Yle's primary source of revenue came from the sales of broadcast receiving licences that had been required to own and operate a radio in Finland since 1919. The licences were issued by the Finnish government, but were sold by retailers, organisations such as the Finnish Radio Association, and individual broadcasters. There was thus limited regulation on the sales side. In order to bring more order to licencing, the Parliament of Finland in 1927 passed a law turning the radio licence into a mandatory annual fee to be collected by the Postal and Telegraph Service on all Finnish households owning a radio. Additionally, parliament directed that a portion of licence fee income go to Yle and also codified into law that Yle was forbidden from airing commercial advertising.
By the end of 1927, Yle had agreements to broadcast programming on locally-owned AM radio stations in five Finnish cities, in addition to the initial station in Helsinki. Nevertheless, because these stations transmitted with low power, Yle's programming could only be heard in limited portions of Finland. The completion of the Lahti longwave transmitter in 1928 improved conditions by making Yle's broadcasts available to most of the country through longwave. By the start of the 1930s, 100,000 households had a receiving licence. Coverage was further improved throughout the 1930s by constructing AM stations in additional cities and making upgrades to existing facilities. In 1933, Yle's headquarters moved to 15, where they would stay until 1968, when they moved to , and then to in 1993.
From private to public At the start, Yle was owned by banks, insurance companies, and smaller groups. In total, 59 different entities were shareholders; the Finnish Radio Association owned the most number of shares overall. Wholly private ownership, however, would not last, as the path to nationalising Yle began in early 1929, when Yle declined to air programming commemorating the tenth anniversary of prohibition in Finland, citing a programme policy of political neutrality. Several newspapers and politicians reacted by accusing Yle of bias and being beholden to the commercial institutions that owned it. The Finnish parliament quickly began to discuss the matter.
After five years of debate, the administrative council representing Yle's shareholders agreed in 1934 to transfer a majority of the company's shares to the Finnish government, thereby turning Yle into a state-owned company under the supervision of the Ministry of Public Works and Transport. As majority shareholder, the ministry directed that licence fee income go to Yle and effectively took over the annual "general meeting" where members of Yle's administrative council were elected. Moreover, Yle became the owner of all local radio stations in Finland; generally, Yle retained the local programming the stations had been airing alongside Yle programming.
International expansion In 1937, Yle expanded into international broadcasting by constructing shortwave radio facilities in Helsinki and Lahti for testing purposes and to stake a claim for Finland on internationally allocated frequencies. Reception reports came in from around Europe and as far away as North America, Australia, and New Zealand. The results of the tests convinced Yle to construct a high-power shortwave facility. A site in Pori was selected for this purpose, with construction beginning in 1939. The new facility was to start broadcasting in time for Yle to provide extensive international broadcasts of the planned 1940 Summer Olympics in Helsinki, but the Olympics were cancelled and the outbreak of World War II prevented the facility from being built fully as intended. Nevertheless, shortwave broadcasts from Pori commenced in 1941. Following the war, Yle obtained a powerful new transmitter and constructed an antenna array technically superior to what had originally been planned. An official inauguration of the facility followed in 1948. By the end of 1950, Yle had decommissioned the Helsinki and Lahti facilities and transferred all shortwave broadcasts to Pori, where they remained until 1987, when Yle constructed a new facility in a rural setting west of Pori. Yle then used this site until completely eliminating shortwave broadcasts at the end of 2006.
Second World War World War II impacted Yle in several ways. The large amount of new equipment Yle had purchased in anticipation of the 1940 Summer Olympics was instead directed for use in wartime programming. In terms of content, Yle temporarily suspended most light entertainment programming and shifted to an emphasis on cultural and informative programming with a serious tone. Entertainment programming that remained was strategically scheduled to compete with Finnish-language programming broadcast by Finland's adversaries. A large portion of Yle's weekly schedule during this time—up to 59% in 1941—contained programming not produced by Yle itself, but by other government entities. This included programming produced by the Finnish Defence Forces for reservists and troops serving on the front lines as well as foreign-language propaganda intended for international audiences produced by the Council of State Information Centre during the Winter War and the State Information Agency during the Continuation War. Following World War II, Yle's schedule returned to generally only airing programming produced by Yle, though foreign-language content contributed by the State Information Agency (followed by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs from 1949) remained on the shortwave service.
The war also affected Yle's infrastructure. The Soviet Union viewed the Lahti longwave station as strategically important to Finland and bombed the transmitter during the Winter War, forcing the station off the air for ten days. Sweden's aired newscasts in Finnish in the interim. Thereafter, the Soviet Union sporadically jammed the Lahti longwave station, necessitating Yle to undertake a series of countermeasures involving varying the wavelength of the station by small increments. Yle also engaged in jamming of its own in 1942 by attempting to block Finnish reception of radio transmissions from the United Kingdom, which had declared war on Finland in December 1941. During the Continuation War, some Yle radio stations broadcast embedded Morse code signals at five-minute intervals to aid the Finnish Air Force and Luftwaffe with navigation. After Finland ceded territory in the Moscow Peace Treaty, Yle lost its transmitters and associated studios in Vyborg and Sortavala; a replacement facility was built in Lappeenranta. Yle later reactivated stations in Vyborg and Sortavala during the Continuation War, but gave them up in 1944 before the signing of the Moscow Armistice. Shortly before the beginning of the Lapland War, German troops destroyed Yle's station in Rovaniemi. No other stations were directly attacked during World War II, although Yle's transmitter building in Helsinki, headquarters in Helsinki, and station in Oulu suffered damage from nearby bombings.
Lex Jahvetti In January 1945, Jalmar Voldemar Vakio (né Hjalmar Woldemar Walldén) resigned as Yle's director general, a position he had served in since 1927. Under company rules, the administrative council alone was to decide on his replacement. In this case, however, the decision process took place concurrent to the 1945 Finnish parliamentary election, in which the Finnish People's Democratic League (SKDL) won the second-highest number of votes and seats. The communist wing of the SKDL wanted one of its members installed as director general and, after the party's relative success in the election, was able to get Prime Minister Juho Kusti Paasikivi to lobby for the selection of Hella Wuolijoki. The administrative council ultimately obliged, naming Wuolijoki as Yle's new director general in April 1945. In the position, Wuolijoki then proceeded to discard Yle's neutral programming policy by creating programmes oriented toward communist viewpoints.