NRK1

Norwegian television channel

NRK1 (pronounced as "NRK en" or " ein") is the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation's (NRK) main television channel.

Test broadcasts started on 12 January 1954, regular test broadcasts started on 13 April 1958 and regular broadcasts started on 20 August 1960, formally opened by King Olaf V. At the time, there were plans to increase its transmitter network to cover 80% of the country by 1970. It is Norway's oldest and largest television channel and was the country's only free to air television channel until the launch of TV 2 in 1992. The channel was formerly known as NRK Fjernsynet (NRK Television), but its name was colloquially abbreviated as just NRK or Fjernsynet ("the television"). On 1 September 1996, the channel renamed as NRK1 due to the launch of NRK2 that day.

Besides its own productions, the channel also broadcasts co productions with other Nordic countries through Nordvision, as well as a significant amount of programmes from English speaking countries like the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, and occasionally from Germany (Babylon Berlin, Das Boot), all in the original language with Norwegian subtitles. Its news programme is called Dagsrevyen. In 2010, NRK HD was launched, broadcasting at 720p. NRK HD was set to make its first official broadcasting from the 2010 Vancouver Olympics opening ceremony, but the first HD broadcast was Super Bowl XLIV, on 7 February 2010. NRK1 eventually turned full time HD, with the separate SD feeds shutting down approximately in 2016. The programming lineup has varied over the years, with an increased and high focus on daytime news in the 2020s, with newscasts almost uninterrupted from 06:30 20:00 on weekdays. Weekends during daytime are filled with culture and sports programmes. The most prestigious entertainment programmes are broadcast on Friday and Saturday nights, including Nytt på nytt, Beat for Beat, Stjernekamp, and Maskorama. Late night schedules after the 23:00 news (Kveldsnytt) consist mostly of documentaries and drama shows. The channel de jure signs off sometime between 04:30 and 05:00, during which time it shows a TV guide, a news feed, and audio simulcast of NRK P1, until it signs back on at 06:30 for the morning news. The channel (as well as its sister channels) maintain a basic teletext service as of November 2023, carrying news from NRK's newssites, a calendar, football results, TV and radio schedules, NRK company info, and departure and arrival schedules for Norwegian airports. An online feed of the teletext exists, but most pages there lag days or months behind the TV feeds' teletexts.

The channel has no alternate audio tracks that can be selected; the text to speech mode (Lydtekst) instead has separate channel slots. This became an issue with the documentary series Melkeveien in 2014, for which both Norwegian Bokmål and Northern Sámi audio tracks were produced: The Bokmål feeds were aired on initial broadcast, while the Sámi feeds were streaming only on initial broadcast, before airing on NRK2 the following weekend during daytime. Other programming where alternate audio feeds were split across multiple TV or radio channels, have included the Eurovision Song Contest, where NRK1, NRK3/NRK P3, and NRK P1 all have separate commentator voices that are exclusive to their channels, and the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup, where matches where NRK had TV broadcast rights had separate commentator voices for NRK1 and NRK Sport. The channel primarily uses digital soft subtitles for all subtitled programming. Alternately, teletext subtitles can alternately be selected on page 777; teletext subs were originally discontinued, but had been brought back by October 2018. Available subtitle selections for digital subs are limited to "Norwegian", "Norwegian for Hearing Impaired", and "None". No distinctions are made between Bokmål and Nynorsk for any NRK1 audio or subtitle feeds.