The Spanish government supports the reception of RTVE's Catalan-language channel in the Canary Islands.
The channel is expected to begin regular broadcasts this fall.
PalmThe Balearic Cultural Organization (OCB) announced this Wednesday that the Spanish government has expressed its support for the new 2Cat channel, promoted by RTVE, to also be available in the Balearic Islands via DTT. The decision now rests with RTVE's General Management, which "will have to find the most appropriate technical solution to make it effective," the organization reported in a press release. The OCB met with the Minister for Digital Transformation and Public Service, Óscar López, in Madrid. The channel is expected to begin regular broadcasts this fall.
The Work has also requested that RTVE's territorial center in the Balearic Islands be provided with the necessary resources to provide content for channel 2Cat, in collaboration with the islands' audiovisual production companies, and that the Balearic Islands be guaranteed access to the children's and youth channel Clan in Catalan from the moment the entity begins broadcasting to Catalonia.
The president of the OCB, Antoni Llabrés, gave a positive assessment of the meeting and asserted that "to advance toward linguistic normalization, it is necessary for Catalan to be present in all spheres, including in state-run public media," adding that "the organization will continue to monitor the steps taken to guarantee the arrival of 2Cat and the Catalan Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)." Llabrés recalled that forty years ago, the organization promoted the reception of radio and television in Catalan, implementing the necessary technical means to receive broadcasts from television and radio channels in Catalonia and the Valencian Community, such as TV3, C33, 3/24, and Canal 9. Now, he said, the OCB 2Cas.
In the list of requests, the OCB has included the possibility, in the medium term, of developing an RTVE channel that covers the entire Catalan language domain, as well as the restoration of Radio 4 broadcasts in the Balearic Islands with its own disconnections, and the increase in territorial disconnections on both public television and radio. Likewise, the organization's representatives have requested that Catalan be immediately the default language in the Archipelago when dual language options are available on TVE channels.
The organization is making these demands taking advantage of the fact that RTVE has announced the launch of a second general-interest TVE channel for Catalonia, which will broadcast primarily in Catalan. This channel originated from the disconnections from the so-called Catalan TVE circuit, which between the 1960s and 1990s also included the Balearic Islands within its broadcasting scope.
In the meeting with the Minister for Digital Transformation and Civil Service, he also emphasized the need to strengthen the presence of the Catalan language in the ALIA program, a public multilingual artificial intelligence infrastructure—in Spanish and the other official languages—developed by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center-National Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS), with the support of the State Secretariat for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence.