The TV crisis was 15 years in the making, following €10 million auction in 2010

Economy mediatechnologyTop Newstv The TV crisis was 15 years in the making, following €10 million auction in 2010 Tv Technology Relevant News The TV crisis was 15 years in the making, following €10 million auction in 2010 13 July 2026 US and Iran trade heavy strikes as Tehran closes Hormuz; attacks spread across Gulf 13 July 2026 Father of British boy, 3, arrested after fatal hotel fall in Chloraka 13 July 2026 Angelos Nicolaou 13 July 2026 FacebookXWhatsAppEmailPrintViber The uproar over Cyprus’s transition to high-definition television is not some sudden problem. It is the chronicle of a foretold failure. What we are living through now is the accumulated result of bad decisions, political neglect and investment paralysis stretching back some 15 years, bad enough to bring the country to within a hair’s breadth of losing free terrestrial television altogether. To understand where we are, we have to go back to 2010, under an AKEL government, when the operating model for digital terrestrial television was chosen. The tender to award the licence, for the Velister platform, turned into a thriller thick with backroom dealing, one that dominated the front pages of the day. During the auction, proceedings were temporarily suspended amid mutual accusations between bidders, while public talk of objections and legal challenges kept the atmosphere at boiling point. In that combustible climate, the price was driven to absurd heights. The final bid came in at €10 million, more than ten times the starting price of just €850,000. That surreal financial burden was then passed straight onto the market itself, building a lopsided model from day one. On this platform, the major television stations found themselves in an awkward double role: they were simultaneously the owners of the consortium and its main customers. Smaller stations, meanwhile, repeatedly complained of unequal treatment and exclusion. The system showed structural weaknesses almost from the start. Operating costs for the channels were crushing, and viewers’ complaints about poor quality and patchy signal coverage were a daily occurrence. The most serious blow, though, was total technological stagnation. For 15 full years, no meaningful upgrade was made. Cyprus stayed locked into an outdated system while the rest of Europe moved on to more modern solutions. When the previous licence expired and Velister’s viability problems became insurmountable, the state faced a nightmare scenario: a definitive blackout on screens and the end of free terrestrial broadcasting. To avoid that dead end and secure the future of free television for years to come, the state moved under emergency procedures, launching a public consultation and a new tender to guarantee free television for the next 15 years. The outcome brings a new network provider, Hellas Sat, to the fore. The new platform promises significantly upgraded picture quality, wider geographical coverage and, crucially, noticeably lower costs for television stations compared with the regime of the last fifteen years. A parallel run of the old platform The current need for citizens to buy new decoders or replace very old television sets did not come out of nowhere. It is the financial cost of a change that should have happened gradually, years ago, and which consumers are now being asked to pay for all at once because of prolonged neglect. Still, to soften the backlash and make things easier for the public, work is under way at a technical level. According to official information, the new platform, Hellas Sat, has made its own investment to bring the old Velister network back into operation for a transitional, parallel period of three months. This means citizens will still be able to tune into the channels they received on the previous platform up until June 30. It should be noted that new decoders and television sets are capable of receiving the previous platform’s signal. That three-month window is decisive. Technical teams are currently working through solutions and configuring the network, with the aim of making the final switch to the new platform’s signal as smooth, automatic and technically undemanding for the public as possible. Yet the essence of the matter remains. A flawed state and business decision made in 2010 was left to its own devices until it reached the edge of the cliff. The state was forced to step in to close out a long-standing failure, and the real question now is whether the transition to the new era will be completed without further hardship for the Cypriot viewer. 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