Internacia Televido

~ the last words ~

In November 2005 a 24-hour video stream was a promise most connections could not accept. I had moved off dial-up by then but broadband in Turkey was new enough that a whole evening of continuous video was something you planned around rather than left running. Internacia Televido launched into that world, aimed at an audience defined not by a country but by a language. It then asked that audience to keep a television station on the air.

It went live on 5 November 2005, the first regular internet television channel broadcasting entirely in Esperanto. It came out of Sao Paulo, built by Flavio Rebelo, who ran the Esperanto news site Ĝangalo. There was no broadcaster behind it and no state subsidy, because there is no state. Esperanto has speakers on every continent and a government nowhere, so the funding had to come from the speakers themselves.

The programming was thin and honest about it. There was a Polish documentary about Esperanto from the 1980s and an ELNA language course called Pasporto al la tuta mondo, alongside a Brazilian documentary with an Esperanto translation laid over the top. Silent comedy clips filled the gaps, needing no language at all. A newscast called Teleĵurnalo and a children's show called Infanurbo were both planned and neither one ever aired.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

The reaction inside the Esperanto world was genuine excitement, and it is not hard to see why. A language movement that had spent a century producing magazines and congresses finally had a television channel of its own, on a medium where nobody had to grant it a frequency. Australian and European Esperanto associations wrote it up. Wikinews covered the launch.

Rebelo went to local banks for financing and was turned down, which left donations as the only mechanism. The drive asked for 35,000 euros to keep the station running for a year. It brought in 19,910, along with support from one patron in Asia. That gap is the whole story of the channel, and everything after it is just the gap arriving.

~ the fall ~

In January 2006 storms in Sao Paulo damaged the servers and took the stream down. It did not come back fully until 28 January. For a channel whose entire proposition was continuous broadcast, weeks of silence during its third month were expensive in a way money could not fix, because the audience it needed to convince was the audience that had just been asked to pay for it.

By August 2006 the raised funds were exhausted and the stream stopped for good. Nine months, most of them broadcasting, one of them dark. The channel never reached the programming it had described to its donors.

~ what got buried with it ~

The interesting thing here is not the failure, which was a straightforward shortfall of about 15,000 euros. It is what the attempt assumed. A television channel for a constructed language with no territory only makes sense on a network, and in 2005 someone worked out that the network had just become cheap enough to try it. That instinct was correct and about five years early.

By 2011 anyone could run a channel out of a bedroom and Esperanto speakers did, in the ordinary way, on YouTube. What they did not need was a schedule or 35,000 euros. Internacia Televido was the last time somebody tried to build the old thing on the new pipe, and it is a small, specific marker of the moment before broadcasting stopped requiring a broadcaster.

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