Television Presentation From Defunct Countries and Regimes

Here's another version of this intro, from the Albanian-language station in Pristina (now the capital of the partially recognized country Kosovo):

This is really interesting: Iranian commercials from before the Islamic revolution (note how Western most of them looked):



And yet another variation of the Yugoslav news intros discussed above -- a special version to mark the 5000th edition of Dnevnik produced by the Belgrade station, 1974:

From 1992, here's some continuity from BOP TV, a commercial broadcaster from Bophuthatswana, one of South Africa's black "homelands" established during Apartheid. BOP TV was also popular elsewhere in South Africa as a commercial alternative to the SABC, but it ceased to exist after Bophuthatswana itself was abolished in 1994:

From TVB Pearl (i.e., TVB's English service) in Hong Kong, the news on the day the colony's governor, Edward Youde, died in 1986:



And TVB's business news, also from 1986:

And from TVB Jade, TVB's Cantonese-language service, here's a 1986 special report on a typhoon striking Hong Kong:

Morning start-up of East German television, 1984:



And as seen in another TV Forum thread...

A Yugoslav-era news intro from Sarajevo:



...and Ljubljana:

Here, in its entirety, is an edition of the East German evening news -- Aktuelle Kamera -- from 1986:

And here is something even more exotic: A couple of clips from Communist Albania, a country so hard-line it broke with the Soviet Union and allied itself with Mao's China because its regime felt that the Soviet Union was insufficiently Communist. After several years as China's ally, it also broke with that country when China embarked on its first reforms. Communist Albania was a closed society and probably the closest Europe came to having its own North Korea.

Here is the first part of an Albanian newscast from 1986:



Here is a longer clip with idents, in-vision continuity, and more news:

Here's more Communist-era Albanian TV (from 1986) -- including continuity and a weather forecast:



Here's a Wikipedia entry about the hard-line Communist dictatorship in Albania:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enver_Hoxha

When did there get colour?

In 1981, according to several sources. (The above clips were recorded outside Albania, hence the poor quality. The transmission were actually in color -- the picture is occasionally in color for a second or two.)

Here's Aktuelle Kamera , the East German TV news, from May Day 1989 -- the last May Day before the fall of the Berlin Wall: