3 channels · 1 channels on air now
To understand Spanish broadcasting you need the country's administrative structure. Spain is composed of autonomous communities, most of which have their own public broadcaster: TV3 in Catalonia, EiTB in the Basque Country and TVG in Galicia publish in their own languages. News in Spain is therefore watched not on a single national screen but through overlapping layers — national channels in Castilian Spanish, regional channels in Catalan, Basque and Galician. Seeing how an event is framed differently in Madrid and in Barcelona is one of the most direct routes into Spanish politics.
The national public broadcaster is RTVE. The corporation lived through the transition from the state television of the Franco period to the public broadcaster of the democratic era, and the political independence of its governance has been a recurring argument ever since.
Two large groups dominate the private sector: Atresmedia and Mediaset España. Atresmedia owns both channels listed below — Antena 3 and laSexta — which are positioned for different audiences with different editorial tones, an interesting instance of a single group broadcasting in two distinct voices.
Spain · Spanish
Antena 3 Noticias is the news service of Antena 3, the flagship channel of the Atresmedia group, and produces among the most watched commercial bulletins in Spain.
Its bulletins are built for a broad audience in a measured, news-led form. Compared with laSexta, owned by the same group, its editorial tone is more centrist; the group positions the two channels deliberately for different audiences.
Spain · Spanish
laSexta is the second channel of the Atresmedia group and takes a different register in news and current affairs: debate programming, satirical formats and investigative files sit at the centre of its identity.
Its political tone is generally taken to lean left, and that is the essential difference from Antena 3, owned by the same group. It carries one of the liveliest expressions of Spanish political argument on television.
Spain · Spanish · ● live
RTVE Noticias is the news service of Spain's public broadcaster, RTVE. Its evening bulletin, Telediario, is one of the country's longest-established news programmes.
RTVE maintains a wide network of foreign bureaus and has particular depth in Latin American coverage; the shared language creates a continuous news flow between Spain and the continent, and RTVE sits at the centre of it. The corporation also reaches Spanish speakers worldwide through its international channel.
It is publicly funded, and its broadcasting independence is set out in law.
Streams are shown from each broadcaster's own official YouTube channel through the YouTube player; the content and all rights belong to those broadcasters. Montegre does not broadcast or retransmit. Live news coverage may contain distressing footage.
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