Österreichischer Rundfunk

The roots of Austrian broadcasting go back to the early 1920s. Before the establishment of regular licensed broadcasting, the private and initially unlicensed station Radio Hekaphon carried out transmissions in Vienna in 1923 and is regarded as an important precursor to Austrian radio.

The predecessor of ORF, the Radio-Verkehrs-Aktiengesellschaft (RAVAG), began regular radio broadcasting in Vienna on 1 October 1924. The founding of RAVAG is generally regarded as the beginning of professional or public broadcasting in Austria.

After the Anschluss in 1938, RAVAG was dissolved and incorporated into the broadcasting system of Nazi Germany as Reichssender Wien.

After the end of the Second World War, broadcasting resumed under Allied occupation. In the occupation period, broadcasting developed in a fragmented way under the four Allied zones; one of the best-known postwar stations was Rot-Weiß-Rot, which operated between 1945 and 1955.

Television broadcasting in Austria began on 1 August 1955 with an experimental service. Regular television service followed on 1 January 1957, initially with a single channel. The direct institutional predecessor of the modern ORF, the Österreichische Rundfunk Ges. m. b. H., was established in December 1957.

After more than 800,000 Austrians signed Hugo Portisch's petition, a major turning point in the broadcaster's history came with the 1964 Rundfunkvolksbegehren, the first popular initiative of the Second Austrian Republic, which called for broadcasting to be freed from party-political influence. The resulting broadcasting reform led in 1967 to the creation of the radio services Ö1, Ö2, and Ö3.

Although ORF did not—unlike West Berlin's SFB—schedule programs for the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War, many Czechoslovaks and Hungarians watched Austrian television through signal overspill. So many large television antennas appeared on Bratislava rooftops that they were nicknamed "the Vienna woods".

In 1974, ORF was transformed into a public-law broadcaster. According to the European Court of Human Rights, the 1974 Broadcasting Act established ORF as a public-law corporation operating on a non-profit basis and entrusted with a public-service mandate.