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Mediaset S.p.A.
Mediaset S.p.A. (formerly known as
Mediaset Italia S.p.A.) is an Italian mass media company which is the largest
commercial broadcaster in the country. The company is controlled by the
holding company MFE - MediaForEurope (the original iteration of Mediaset S.p.A., a.k.a. the Mediaset Group), which is majority-owned by Berlusconi family's
Fininvest Group. Stemming from a business founded in 1987 by entrepreneur and former Italian prime minister
Silvio Berlusconi, Mediaset competes primarily against the public broadcaster
RAI, the privately owned
La7 and (through
Sky Group Limited)
Comcast's
Sky Italia.
Mediaset's headquarters are in
Milan, Lombardy. Many of its studios are located in the Milano 2 area of
Segrate, a municipality bordering Milan, where broadcasts of local station TeleMilano (now airing nationally as Mediaset's
Canale 5) began in 1978. After merging with various local broadcaster to form the Canale 5 syndication, much production was moved to
Cologno Monzese, where the infrastructure of the former Telealtomilanese was present. The company currently has three main television production centres, in
Milan (
Segrate,
Cologno Monzese) and
Rome.
[1]
History[edit]
Beginnings in late 70s[edit]
Silvio Berlusconi's involvement in television industry began in 1978, with
Telemilano, a local
Milan-based broadcaster that became
Canale 5 two years later and began broadcasting nationally. Canale 5 was subsequently joined by
Italia 1 (bought from the publishing group Rusconi in 1982) and
Rete 4 (acquired from
Arnoldo Mondadori Editore in 1984). Television area was called
RTI and became established with three national analogue networks, supported by an advertising sales company,
Publitalia '80, that exclusively collects advertising for all three channels, and two other companies,
Videotime, that manages TV technology and production activities, and
Elettronica Industriale that guarantees signal distribution through the management of the broadcasting infrastructure. In 1987, it bought out Italian's leading home video distributor Domovideo, in a seesaw contest with Vincenzo Romangoli.
[2]
In the 1980s, Berlusconi's company
Fininvest was contracted to operate
TV Koper-Capodistria, a TV station which was intended to serve Italian-speaking audiences in the region of
Istria,
Slovenia,
Yugoslavia, but was widely available in Italy through cable systems. Under Fininvest's control, the station mainly operated as a sports channel. This arrangement ended in 1990.
[3][4]
In 1990,
Silvio Berlusconi Communications [
it] entered into a partnership with
DIC Enterprises and having SBC subsidiary
Reteitalia S.p.A. [
it] and Spanish TV channel
Telecinco (which SBC held a stake) to co-produce shows,
[5] a relationship that lasted until 1994.