Yle

Yleisradio Oy (lit. 'General Radio Ltd.'; Swedish: Rundradion Ab), abbreviated as Yle (Finnish: [ˈyle]; formerly styled in all uppercase until 2012), translated into English as the Finnish Broadcasting Company, is Finland's national public broadcasting company, founded in 1926. It is a joint-stock company, which is 99.98% owned by the Finnish state and employs around 3,000 people in Finland.

Yle was long funded by revenues obtained from a broadcast receiving license fee payable by the owners of radio sets (1927–1976) and television sets (1958–2012) and through a portion of the broadcasting license fees payable by private television broadcasters. Since 2013, the license fee has been replaced by a public broadcasting tax (known as the Yle tax) collected annually from Finnish citizens and corporations. The main part of the Yle tax is collected from individual taxpayers, with payments assessed on a sliding scale. Minors and those with an annual income less than €7,813 are exempt. At the lower limit, the tax payable by individuals is €50 per annum, and the maximum (payable by an individual with a yearly income of €20,588 or more) is €140. The rationale for the abolition of the television license fee was the development of other means of delivering Yle's services, such as the Internet, and the consequent impracticality of continuing to tie the fee to the ownership of a specific device. Yle receives no advertising revenue, as all channels are advertisement-free. Yle has a status that could be described as that of a non-departmental public body. It is governed by a parliamentary governing council. Yle's turnover in 2010 was €398.4 million. In 2024, Yle's annual budget was about €600 million.

Yle operates three national television channels, 13 radio channels and services, and 25 regional radio stations. As Finland is constitutionally bilingual—around 5.5% of the population speaks Swedish as their native language—Yle provides radio and TV programming in Swedish through its Swedish-language department, Svenska Yle. As is customary in Finland, foreign films and TV programmes (as well as segments of local programmes that feature foreign language content, like news reports) are generally subtitled on Yle's channels. Dubbing is used in cartoons intended for young children who have not yet learned to read; off-screen narration in documentaries is also frequently dubbed.^{[citation needed]}

In the field of international broadcasting, one of Yle's best-known services was Nuntii Latini, the news in Latin, which was broadcast worldwide and made available on the Internet. Yle was one of 23 founding broadcasting organisations of the European Broadcasting Union in 1950. It hosted the Eurovision Song Contest 2007 in Helsinki.

Suomen Yleisradio (Finland's General Radio) was founded in Helsinki on 29 May 1926. The first radio programme was transmitted on 9 September that year in a studio at Unioninkatu 20, generally considered the birthdate of regular broadcasting activities in Finland. The name Yleisradio was taken from the Defense Forces, where Yleisradio meant a radio broadcast that could be heard by everyone. Before YLE, Radio broadcasts were done by Radiola in Helsinki from March 23, 1924, the radio battalion of the Finnish Defense Forces in Santahamina at the former Russian Empire Baltic Fleet officer casino, now Katajanokka casino starting in April 1923 and by Tampereen radioyhdistys, (Tampere Radio Society) in April 1924. Not until 1928 did Yle's broadcasts become available throughout the country. By the beginning of the 1930s, 100,000 households could listen to Yle programmes, and in 1933, Yle moved to Fabianinkatu 15, were it would stay until 1968 were it moved to Ylen Kesäkatu and then Mediatalo in 1978.

In 1957, Yle made its first television broadcast tests, and regular TV programming began the next year under the name Suomen Televisio (Finland's Television), which was later renamed Yle TV1. Television's popularity in the country grew rapidly. In 1964, Yle obtained TES-TV and Tamvisio, which were merged into Yle TV2. In 1969, the Finnish Broadcasting Company began broadcasting television programmes in colour, but due to the high cost of colour technology, colour only became standard in the late 1970s. On 1 May 1977, Tv-uutiset (TV-news) and TV-nytt switched to colour. In 1996, Yle's operations in Åland were transferred to Ålands Radio and TV, and in 1998, Yle's transmitter network and related assets were spun off into a separate company called Digita Oy [fi].

In radio, Yleisradio was a legal monopoly until 1985, when local radio stations were permitted, and maintained a national monopoly until 1995, when national radio networks were allowed.

In the 2000s, Yle established several new radio and television channels. In 2007, there was a digital television switchover. A completely new digital channel, Yle Teema (Yle Theme) was introduced, and the Swedish-language FST (Finlands Svenska Television, Finland's Swedish Television) was moved from its analogue channel to its digital one, YLE FST5 (later renamed Yle Fem). In addition to these four channels (TV1, TV2, Teema, and Fem), a fifth channel, YLE24, was launched in 2001 for 24-hour news programming. This channel was replaced by YLE Extra, a channel attempting to cater to the youth, which was in turn decommissioned in 2007. Until 4 August 2008, the fifth channel was used to broadcast Yle TV1 with Finnish subtitles on programmes in foreign languages (without having to enable the TV's or digital set-top box's subtitle function).