REN TV () is a Russian free-to-air television network. It was founded on 1 January 1997 by Irena Lesnevskaya and her son, Dmitry Lesnevsky, who had been running REN TV as a production house for other national Russian television channels. Though it focuses mostly on audiences aged between 18 and 45 years old, the network offers programming for a wide range of demographics.
REN TV's network is a patchwork of 406 independent broadcasting companies in Russia and the CIS. REN TV's signal is received in 718 towns and cities in Russia - from Kaliningrad in the West to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk in the East. It has a potential audience of 113.5 million viewers (officially 120 million viewers)Media holding company Ren TV (in Russian). with more than 12 million of them living in Moscow city and Moscow Oblast (Moscow Region). REN TV works with 10 broadcaster affiliates and 19 cable operators in the CIS and the Baltic states; 181 cities can receive REN TV's signal. It is one of the twenty national television channels on the national digital terrestrial platform, being available on the second multiplex (corresponding to channels 11 to 20), on channel 11.
Historically the network was defined for its opposition stance, however, gradually starting in 2005, and rapidly from 2011, it began to push itself closer to the officialist narrative, a move which was criticized by TV critics. In the past, the channel was an entertainment channel, though since the early 2010s, coinciding with its new political alignment, a substantial amount of its original programming consists of documentaries with fictionalized theories, alternate history, extraterrestrials and criticism of events such as the ones in Ukraine or opposition in Russia. The conspiracy-based programming line entered into full bloom in 2017, now taking a large amount of its schedule.
REN TV also has an international version, created in 2016.
Ownership
Until 1 July 2005 the channel belonged to its founder Irena Lesnevskaya and her son (30%) and the Russian utility RAO UES headed by Anatoly Chubais. In 2005 Bertelsmann's RTL bought 30% of REN TV with steel maker Severstal and oil and natural gas company Surgutneftegaz each buying 35%.Worldwide operations, RTL corporate website. Retrieved on 2007-07-28.
Severstal's Alexey Germanovich on 18 December 2006 ceded the chairperson of REN TV's board to Lyubov Sovershaeva, President Vladimir Putin's former deputy envoy to the North-West federal okrug"New leader in Northwest Russia appointed 2006-10-05", Health care, 5 October 2006 (Newsletter from the North-West of Russia, The East Europe Committee of the Swedish Health Care Community), p. 4. Retrieved on 2007-07-28. Cites for Sovershaeva's former role. and chairperson of the board at ABRos Investments, a subsidiary of St Petersburg's Russia bank. ABRos had bought a considerable stake in REN. Масс-медиа: Друг президента стал акционером "Рен ТВ" (Mass-media: drug prezidenta stal aktsionerom 'Ren TV', "Mass-media: Friend of the President became a shareholder of REN TV", Lenta.ru (Rambler Media Group) 19 December 2006. The bank, whose chairman, Yury Kovalchuk, was a close friend of President Vladimir Putin, owned 38% of its home town's TRK Petersburg TV channel – and was likely to buy more of that company, analysts had told 19 December 2006's Kommersant-daily.President’s Mate Takes Over Ren TV , Kommersant-daily, 19 December 2006. Retrieved on 2007-07-27. REN TV and TRK Petersburg would merge into a single media holding, though they would operate independently, industry observers had told the daily.
Russian media had reported that oil and gas group Surgutneftegaz had sold its stake in the channel to ABRos, which had increased its stake in the media company from 45% to 70%. '[T]here are indications that Bertelsmann was interested in selling up, after about 18 months in the Russian TV market,' the broadcasting news website added.Abros ups stake in Ren TV, broadbandtvnews.com, Cambridge, UK, 20 April 2007. Retrieved on 2007-07-28.
Currently National Media Group owns 82%, and Russian state oil company Gazprom subsidiary SOGAZ owns 18%.
History Production company The history of REN TV is connected to the effects of the August Coup, when former heads of Soviet Central Television Irena Lesenskaya and her son Dimitri decided to create their production company. The company was registered under the name «ЛИС и С» («Лесневская Ирена Стефановна и сын») on 19 August 1991, but due to political chaos, as well as a similar name being registered at the time («ЛИС’С», Sergey Lisovskiy), the registration was delayed. Two weeks after the coup the company was registered under the name «REN» (formally registered on 1 October 1991).
Its first programs were Astrological Forecast (13 November 1991, RTR) and the Christmas special The Irony of Fate, or Merry Christmas) (24 December 1991, First Channel of CT SSSR, days before its dissolution). These two were followed by other productions for national channels, such as To Those Who Remember, Rost's Stable, Man-to-Man Talk from Eldar Ryazanov to Boris Yeltsin Dog-Show: Me and My Dog and The White Woodpecker Club. At the time of founding, its staff consisted of only nine people, though ten years later, it rose to over 500.
Becoming a channel In the spring of 1996, REN-TV became the main shareholder of JSC Joint Stock Company Accept, a television company that owned a license to broadcast on UHF channel 49 Moscow (occupied at the time by the local channel M—49, launched on 1 January 1994). In May of the same year, the production company REN-TV started work on the creation of its full-blown homonymous television channel. It was assumed that the schedule would consist of its existing original productions. Irena and Dmitry Lesnevsky talked about getting Channel 49 at their own disposal as follows:Volodya Molchanov and I were in Israel. <...> And there I found a man who said that he had read somewhere in an interview that I dreamed of my own channel. And then this man, who escaped from Russia and once worked for the Ministry of Communications, said that he took a license for himself, he now had a channel in Moscow, but few people watch him — Channel 49. <...> I was given a meeting with this man who said: "I've been waiting for you! People come to me with sacks of money. But I would like to give it not to people who will make money from it, but to a production company so that there is content, so that there is television." I say, "So you're also an ideologist!" He says, "Well, I still dream of returning to Russia someday." <...> In short, we agreed on a certain amount, extending the payment for two or three years. Then he demanded more and more every time, until we sent him. But we paid him everything, and he was still complaining when we sold it — he realized that they had made a fortune out of nothing. Not only did the Kremlin want to take it away, but also the Germans came in with the money. He decided that we hadn't paid him, that we should give him some kind of percentage. But it was actually funny. He didn't put anything into it at all, except for the license.Irena Lesnevskaya There are four UHF channels that can be developed: 31, 49, 51 and 27. Anyone in Moscow can become accessible to the widest audience, free of charge, according to the same scheme in which TV-6 was introduced. We have held talks with channel 49. And in February we managed to buy it. <...> We bought a transmitter, a small staff of ten people, and debts that were immediately paid off. From that moment on, a new era began for us, the transition from an ambitious production company to an equally ambitious broadcasting company.Dmitry Lesnevsky
Since that time, M-49's network started to serve as a test broadcast for the new REN-TV channel, whose launch line-up consisted exclusively of productions from its first three to four years of operation, that it made for other networks. According to the founders, REN-TV was supposed to be "an intelligent channel, a space for talented people who cannot achieve their goals on existing TV channels": It was in this "intelligent" format that the channel carried out its programming format during the first few years of operation. Under the leadership of Irena Lesnevskaya, the first generation of post-Soviet Russian journalists appeared, such as Eldar Ryazanov, Yuri Rost, Grigory Gorin, Bulat Okudzhava, Alexander Shirvindt, Yuri Nikulin, Vladimir Molchanov, Arkady Arki, and Leonid Filatov.
As a sign of gratitude for Yeltsin's support in his election campaign, REN TV received the right to broadcast in Moscow. In the fall of 1996, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov supported the creation of Irena Lesnevskaya's new TV channel and became the head of its board of trustees. It also includee Egor Yakovlev, Alexey Simonov, Alexander Kabakov and Nikolai Petrov. According to experts, the mayor's participation in the creation of the TV channel, which at that time actively provided the floor to the Moscow administration, could indicate that Luzhkov had already begun preparations for the next presidential election and had presidential ambitions.Лужков, Юрий // Лентапедия At the same time, the Bank of Moscow, controlled by the Moscow authorities, provided an initial loan for REN-TV, which was repaid a year later. Teaser videos of the TV channel began to appear on NVS in mid-December 1996.
1995-2005: REN TV under the Lesnesvkys On 1 January 1997, REN-TV began broadcasting instead of NVS, but at the same time it briefly left the name of its predecessor on its logo, this being rendered as REN-NVS. Initially, the channel began broadcasting between 13:15 and 17:00 Moscow time and ended it around 01:00, and the amount of airtime varied from 9 to 12 hours a day. Later, the broadcast began at 14:00. The channel was broadcast to the regions through local affiliates (Reg-TV in St. Petersburg, Network NN in Nizhny Novgorod, Afontovo in Krasnoyarsk, Everything for You in Tambov, Channel Four in Yekaterinburg, TV2 in Tomsk, Takt in Kursk, Akhtuba in Volgograd, SKAT in Samara, Expovim in Rostov-on-Don, Istoki in Orel, Bars in Ivanovo, Yekaterinodar in Krasnodar, and others), which have been receiving satellite signals since NVS existed. Until 1999, REN-TV broadcast its programs without time zone adjustments, using a single feed calibrated to Moscow's timezone, and at night and in the morning, for the network's affiliates outside the European part of Russia, it delivered a full or partial relay of the following day's schedule in order to retransmit them by partners at a more convenient time for them. On 6 September 1999, REN-TV began time-sensitive broadcasting throughout Russia, having four time zone feeds: +0 (for European Russia), +2 (for the Urals and, until 2016, Western Siberia), +4 (for Siberia, until 2016, for Central and Eastern Siberia) and +7 (for the Far East), becoming the third TV channel in Russia to launch such a service. By the end of the 1990s, the channel's broadcasting was extended to most of the country, while until 2003 it was carried out exclusively on the network principle - with retransmission in all regions except Moscow through the frequencies of its regional affiliates. REN-TV
To compete with the larger Russian TV broadcasters, the channel, led by Irena Lesnevskaya and her son Dmitry, began to actively develop its operations. Positioning itself as a general TV channel, REN-TV included news and current affairs programs, entertainment and music programs, author programs (programs produced by a single presenter), sports programs and events in its network, television series, mostly American, animated series and feature films from international catalogues.