YLE (Yleisradio Oy) is Finland's national broadcasting company, founded in 1926. YLE is a public-broadcasting organization which shares many of its characteristics with its British counterpart, the BBC, on which it was largely modeled.
A public limited company, owned by the Finnish state (with a 99.98 % share) and funded through private television broadcasting license fees and a television fee, which in Finland is between €208.15 and €215.4 per annum, allocated by the cabinet, YLE has a status that could be described as that of a non-departmental public body. It is governed by a parliamentary governing council.
Today YLE operates five national television channels, 13 radio channels and services, and 25 regional radio stations. Finland being an officially bilingual country – around 5.5% of the population have Swedish as their mother-tongue – YLE provides Radio and TV programming in Swedish through two departments: Finlands Svenska Television and Finlands Svenska Radio. As in Finland, across all channels and cinema, foreign films are subtitled also in YLE. Dubbing is used exclusively in cartoons intended for young children who are yet to learn to read.
In the field of international broadcasting, one of YLE's best known services is Nuntii Latini, the news in Latin, which is broadcast worldwide as well as being made available over the internet. YLE was also one of 23 founding broadcasting organisations of the European Broadcasting Union in 1950. YLE hosted the Eurovision Song Contest 2007 in Helsinki, Finland.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YLE
http://www.yle.fi
