Audiovisual memory is our biography
October 26, 2022

Audiovisual memory is our biography


On World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, celebrated on 27 October, we look at two pioneering television channels in Armenia, and the importance of preserving their broadcast archives for generations to come.

Time is running out for audiovisual collections around the world due to deterioration and technical obsolescence. Armenian channels are no exception, and national and regional channels have preserved a remarkable audiovisual memory, in the form vast archives dating back to when they first started broadcasting in the late 1980s.

Tsayg TV

Tsayg TV is a pioneering regional channel, founded in 1991 by a group of enthusiasts in Gyumri, the second-largest city in Armenia. Today, the channel is part of a unique network of regional media outlets working with the EU-funded European Media Facility in Armenia implemented jointly by DW Akademie, BBC Media Action, Open Society Foundation – Armenia, Hetq and Factor TV. Like others, they went through the transformation from analogue to digital content production and broadcast. Yet throughout these years, even during the socio-economic crisis in the late 1990s, they have been careful to preserve their archives, old analogue hard drives, films, and VHS videos. Now, the only way to save this content for future generations is to digitise it.

Tsayg (Ցայգ) is translated as the short interval between the morning and night. Local residents will recall Tsayg TV’s evening callsigns (Pozivnoys), which announced the start of the television day back then. You may wonder why the TV schedule was starting late in the evening or at night. During the late 90s, with Armenia in the grip of social-economic crisis (the so-called “Cold and Dark” times), people only used to have electricity for an hour from 10 to 11pm, and this was the only time that people had for watching TV.

The main content of the channel was created by the same enthusiasts who oversaw both technical maintenance and content creation. Those enthusiasts were more than 70 people sharing the same problems and issues as their viewers, and they worked hard to entertain them with locally-produced TV programmes, debates, and stories. 

“During the cold and dark times, the citizen of newly independent Armenia wanted to see on television that they were not alone, that their problems are shared by everyone. We were even working during the blackouts. We would carry our heavy equipment outside and do the setup in our yard. There were background noises, and the scene wasn’t staged professionally, but our audience understood it all,” recalls Tsayg TV Managing Director, Margarita Minasyan.

Many may wonder what the point of preserving and digitalising old content from regional TV is. Margarita replies:   

“Sometimes we may not notice the significance of the moment we are experiencing. But documenting important moments from different periods of our country’s life and passing them on to later generations through photos and videos so that they too can experience it is remarkable. People often approach us asking, ‘do you remember after the earthquake in Gyumri, you made a video report at our place, my father was talking in that video. Have you kept it in your archives?’ Those archives depict the transformations our country has gone through. Through those memories on film, a person can re-evaluate, and re-experience specific moments – this is our intangible cultural value,” adds Margarita. 

“Now, we are going through a digitalisation process,” says Margarita, a multi-layered process, which implies the involvement of many specialists, programmatic corrections and technical tools.

At the same time, we all know that if this audiovisual heritage is not digitised, even if it is preserved in analogue form, it risks becoming invisible: not mapped, not researched, not seen.

Alt TV

Until 1999, there were only five TV stations in Armenia. But with the emergence of a more open audiovisual market, the competition for viewers and advertising revenue began to increase.

Alt TV was one of the pioneers of that period. Like Tsayg TV, Alt is also part of the European Media Facility, benefitting from EU-funded support to strengthen its capacities and produce multimedia materials illustrating vivid regional issues and concerns.

Alt TV was founded in 1989 as part of the ‘Tatev’ association affiliated with the Communist Party. At that time, television licenses were not regulated by law, and any group of individuals willing to create audiovisual stories could buy them. The Alt crew was one of the first to do so.

“During the ‘cold and dark’ years, when the electricity was only on for a few hours, we had an alternative energy generator. But we still had to adapt our programmes to the time of day when people had power. It was either 6-9pm, or 9pm to midnight, or then 9-10am in the very morning only,” recalls Angela Stepanyan, Editor-in-chief of Alt TV.

At the very beginning, the channel’s creative team was made up of 27 specialists. Then, as the number of programmes increased, so did the need for technical support, and the number of people involved began to expand.

In addition to being a source of entertainment, the citizens of newly independent Armenia saw television as a platform where they could talk about the problems that concerned them, raise regional issues and problems. These concerns are all recorded in the reports stored in the archives of Alt TV, about water issues, agricultural and ecological problems.

“There were many activist groups back then. We created many stories about them. The other day, someone came and said, ‘do you remember that we took over the Regional Commissioner (Raykom)? I was the little boy sitting at the window with the flag in my hand. Can you digitise those materials?’” says Khachik Danielyan, the founder of the ALT TV channel.

Unfortunately, Alt only existed as a television channel until January 2021. The channel switched online after losing the state competition for broadcast licences. Despite this, Alt has maintained its position as a citizen’s voice and continues to reflect regional, agricultural, socio-economic, and environmental issues.

While speaking of the importance of audiovisual memory, Khachik says: “Audiovisual memory is our biography. The documentation of all the difficulties that our country has gone through, even if there are things we refuse to remember. But what should we do with them, throw them away? We can’t.”

Archives are therefore of crucial value for all TV companies. If they are not digitised, future generations won’t be able to witness the civic transformation that the country has undergone. This means we are at the risk of losing evidence of the post-USSR crisis, including Armenia’s struggle for independence and democracy.

The “European Media Facility in Armenia – Building Sustainable and Professional Media” project is implemented by DW Akademie in cooperation with BBC Media Action, Open Society Foundation – Armenia, Hetq/ Investigative Journalists NGO and Factor TV, and is funded by the European Union and the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).

The “European Media Facility in Armenia” has developed a unique network of regional media outlets. Through the media support programme by DW Akademie and consortium members, partners like Tsayg TV and Alt TV have gained the opportunity to enhance their capacities and produce quality content using the latest multimedia genres.

Author: Diana Shahbazyan, DW Akademie



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