REN TV

REN TV (Russian: РЕН ТВ) is a Russian free-to-air television network. It was founded on 1 January 1997 by Irena Lesnevskaya and her son, Dmitry Lesnevsky, who had been running REN TV as a production house for other national Russian television channels. Though it focuses mostly on audiences aged between 18 and 45 years old, the network offers programming for a wide range of demographics. REN TV's network is a patchwork of 406 independent broadcasting companies in Russia and the CIS. REN TV's signal is received in 718 towns and cities in Russia - from Kaliningrad in the West to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk in the East. It has a potential audience of 113.5 million viewers (officially 120 million viewers) with more than 12 million of them living in Moscow city and Moscow Oblast (Moscow Region). REN TV works with 10 broadcaster affiliates and 19 cable operators in the CIS and the Baltic states; 181 cities can receive REN TV's signal. It is one of the twenty national television channels on the national digital terrestrial platform, being available on the second multiplex (corresponding to channels 11 to 20), on channel 11. Historically the network was defined for its opposition stance, however, gradually starting in 2005, and rapidly from 2011, it began to push itself closer to the officialist narrative, a move which was criticized by TV critics. In the past, the channel was an entertainment channel, though since the early 2010s, coinciding with its new political alignment, a substantial amount of its original programming consists of documentaries with fictionalized theories, alternate history, extraterrestrials and criticism of events such as the ones in Ukraine or opposition in Russia. The conspiracy-based programming line entered into full bloom in 2017, now taking a large amount of its schedule. REN TV also has an international version, created...