Ethiopia's Booming TV Industry: A Brief History
The recent influx of Ethiopian television channels, especially those broadcast over satellite, has completely changed the landscape of Ethiopia's television industry. An audience that was previously deprived of compelling programming for better part of the last half century is now being bombarded with new content on a daily basis. From the gripping dubbed foreign dramas, talk shows and documentaries to their locally produced counterparts, infotainment has become ubiquitous over the airwaves. So how did this all come be in such a short amount of time? Firstly, one must examine the inception of television in Ethiopia. Television in Ethiopia was first introduced in 1964, when the then Emperor Haile Selassie established, with assistance from the British firm Thomson, the first state owned Ethiopian TV channel (ETV). Broadcasting commenced with coverage of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) summit, predecessor to the African Union (AU), which took