page_title: ZDF
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: ZDF / History
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Die ZDF-Zentrale in Mainz. English: Head of ZDF in Mainz, Germany.
context_page_description: Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, officially abbreviated as ZDF, is a German public-service television broadcaster based in Mainz, Rhineland-Palatinate. It is run as an independent nonprofit institution, which was founded by all federal states of Germany. ZDF is financed by television licence fees and advertising revenues.
  The broadcaster is well known for its famous programmes heute, a newscast established in 1963, and Wetten, dass..? an entertainment show that premiered in 1981, and ended in 2014. Thomas Bellut, ZDF's director general, was elected by the ZDF Television Council in 2011.
context_section_description: In 1959, the government of Konrad Adenauer began preparations to form a second nationwide television network with the intention of competing with ARD. Adenauer perceived ARD's news coverage to be too critical of his government, and believed that two of the organizations primarily responsible for its news reporting – the Deutsche Presse-Agentur and Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk, which produced the nightly Tagesschau – were too close to the opposition Social Democratic Party (SPD) to ever be able to report neutrally on his Christian Democratic Union government. The new television company, called the Freies Fernsehen Gesellschaft (Free Television Society) but derisively called Adenauer-Fernsehen by critics, was founded on 25 July 1960.
  The Deutsche Bundespost began constructing a second transmitter network on UHF channels, which required new reception equipment. For older receivers, a converter was sold for about 80 DM (about $20 in 1961 dollars ($171 today)). As with the earlier ARD television network, the location of the transmitters was carefully planned to ensure the entire country would be able to receive the programming.
  To test the transmitters and encourage the public to purchase UHF receivers, the federal government allowed the ARD network to create a temporary secondary channel, ARD 2, which was broadcast daily from 8 to 10 pm. ARD 2 began broadcasting on 1 May 1961 in the transmission area of Hessischer Rundfunk and a month later expanded nationwide.
caption: The ZDF administrative headquarters in Mainz
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