Television film

A television film (also known as a TV film; television movie; TV movie; telefilm; telemovie; made-for-television film; direct-to-TV film; movie of the week (MOTW or MOW); feature-length drama; single drama and original movie) is a feature-length motion picture that is produced for, and originally distributed by or to, a television network, in contrast to theatrical films, which are made explicitly for initial showing in movie theaters.

Origins and history

Though not exactly labelled as such, there were early precedents for "television movies", such as Talk Faster, Mister, which aired on WABD (now WNYW) in New York City on December 18, 1944, and was produced by RKO Pictures, or the 1957 The Pied Piper of Hamelin, based on the poem by Robert Browning, and starring Van Johnson, one of the first filmed "family musicals" made directly for television. That film was made in Technicolor, a first for television, which ordinarily used color processes originated by specific networks (most "family musicals" of the time, such as Peter Pan, were not filmed but broadcast live and preserved on kinescope, a recording of a television program made by filming the picture from a video monitor – and the only method of recording a television program until the invention of videotape).

TV4 Film

TV4 Film is a Swedish film channel owned by TV4 Group.

TV4 applied for a licence to broadcast a film channel terrestrially in the autumn of 2003 and was granted a licence in December. The channel was launched as TV4 Film in April 2004. The first film shown was Top Gun.

Films are delivered from several distributors, including MGM, Paramount, Warner Brothers, Nordisk Film, SF and Sonet Film. The channel focuses on "modern classics", meaning that the films shown on the channel are mostly from the '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s and '90s.

A Finnish version of the channel was launched in November 2006 in cooperation with MTV3. It is called Sub Leffa.

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TV 2 Film

TV 2 Film is a 24-hour two-star movie channel owned by TV 2.

It was launched on November 1, 2005, at 9 p.m. First to air was the Danish feature film The Green Butchers.

The channel mostly shows American two-star movies. Each movie is shown many times over the course of several days.

In August 2008, the channel started broadcasting in the widescreen format. This was followed by the launch of a high-definition simulcast of the channel on January 1, 2009.

The channel was developed from a film strand on TV 2 called "en go' film uden afbrydelser" ("A good movie without interruptions"). Initially, the channel carried advertising between the films, but this practise was discontinued in 2007 as the advertising sales had remained modest.

On satellite, TV 2 Film (as well as TV 2 Charlie and TV 2 Film) was initially exclusively available via Canal Digital. The competing Viasat platform started broadcasting the channels in January 2009.

Since 1 November 2009, the channel also became available terrestrially (via Viaccess-technology by Boxer-approved digital boxes and cards), the same date as Denmark closed down all analogue terrestrial broadcasting and started up DVB-T and MPEG2/MPEG4 digital terrestrial broadcasting. Since then, DVB-T2 has been introduced for HD and TV2 Film is now terrestrially broadcast both as HD (through DVB-T2 & MPEG4) and SD (through DVB-T and MPEG4).