TVE - Station Ident (Summer 2013)

Copyright (c) 2013 Corporación de Radio y Televisión Española, S.A.

Televisión Española (TVE) is the national state-owned public TV broadcaster of Spain, and it was founded on 28 October 1956 upon the introduction of television in the country. It was operated by the state-owned Radiotelevisión Española, or RTVE, which has overall responsibility for national public service radio and television under a Parliament-appointed General Manager who, in addition to being answerable to a Board of Directors, reports to an all-party committee of the national parliament, as provided for in the Public Radio and Television Law of 2006.

Spanish state-wide public broadcasting services have undergone numerous restructurings and reorganizations throughout its history, and have assumed numerous identities. RTVE's history may be traced back to the first radio broadcasts of Radio Nacional de España (RNE) from Salamanca, developed as a propaganda tool for the Rebel faction during the Spanish Civil War. RNE was founded on 19 January 1937, and was subservient to the State Delegation for Press and Propaganda led by Vicente Gay Forner.

Throughout the Franco regime, the national radio service depended successively on the FET y de las JONS's Vice-Secretariat of Popular Education, on the Ministry of National Education (since 1945) and on the Ministry of Information and Tourism, since the creation of the latter in 1951. Then, in July 1945, in the wake of the transfer of responsibilities over Press and Propaganda to the Ministry of National Education, radio broadcasting became a standalone directorate general: the Dirección General de Radiodifusión; or the Directorate General for Radio Broadcasting.

After some trial broadcasts, Televisión Española (TVE), now known as La 1, began its broadcasts on 28 October 1956 from the Madrid's Paseo de la Habana, reaching the roughly 600 television receivers existing in Madrid at the time. It was the only TV station operated in Spain up until the launch of La 2, its sister channel, in 1966. Throughout Spain's change in political power in the years that followed from 1956, Spanish television was thus used as a means of Francoist propaganda until the country's transition to democracy, and then as a primary educator of democratic values, and onwards to this day, as a creator of social debate.