Sweden's SVT is called SVT because Scottish Television already owned STV
The logical abbreviation for Sveriges Television would be STV. When the Swedish broadcaster got its own company in 1979, though, those letters were already registered within the European Broadcasting Union by Scottish Television. So Sweden's national channel became SVT instead, a name it still carries today.
Sweden built its broadcasting on the British model. In the 1920s radio became a licence-funded monopoly run by a limited company, AB Radiotjänst, owned by the radio industry and the press, which was also among the 23 founders of the European Broadcasting Union in 1950. Test television broadcasts began on 29 October 1954 from Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology. Official transmissions started from a new transmitter at Nacka on 4 September 1956, a licence for set owners followed that October, and regular programming arrived in 1957, with the first newscast, Aktuellt, in 1958.
A second channel, TV2, launched on 5 December 1969, the same day the enlarged TV-huset headquarters in Stockholm opened, then among the biggest television studios in Europe. The two channels were meant to compete stimulatingly inside one company, and from 1972 each had its own rival news programme, Rapport and Aktuellt, with separate staffs duplicating much of their coverage until they merged in 2000. Colour tests began in 1966 and regular colour came in 1970.
For decades SVT was the only Swedish television. The satellite channel TV3 broke that in 1987, and in 1992 private TV4 won terrestrial rights, overtaking TV2 as the most watched channel by 1995. SVT still takes no advertising apart from sponsors of sporting events, and in 2018 parliament replaced the licence fee with a public service charge tied to income tax. It remains Sweden's biggest network, with a 36.4 percent audience share.
News comes in several minority languages too, including Finnish, Swedish Sign Language and Northern Sami. SVT has hosted the Eurovision Song Contest seven times, most recently in 2024.
Source: Sveriges Television
