REN TV

Until 1 July 2005 the channel belonged to its founder Irena Lesnevskaya and her son (30%) and the Russian utility RAO UES headed by Anatoly Chubais. In 2005 Bertelsmann's RTL bought 30% of REN TV with steel maker Severstal and oil and natural gas company Surgutneftegaz each buying 35%.

Severstal's Alexey Germanovich on 18 December 2006 ceded the chairperson of REN TV's board to Lyubov Sovershaeva, President Vladimir Putin's former deputy envoy to the North-West federal okrug and chairperson of the board at ABRos Investments, a subsidiary of St Petersburg's Russia bank. ABRos had bought a considerable stake in REN. The bank, whose chairman, Yury Kovalchuk, was a close friend of President Vladimir Putin, owned 38% of its home town's TRK Petersburg TV channel – and was likely to buy more of that company, analysts had told 19 December 2006's Kommersant-daily. REN TV and TRK Petersburg would merge into a single media holding, though they would operate independently, industry observers had told the daily.

Russian media had reported that oil and gas group Surgutneftegaz had sold its stake in the channel to ABRos, which had increased its stake in the media company from 45% to 70%. '[T]here are indications that Bertelsmann was interested in selling up, after about 18 months in the Russian TV market,' the broadcasting news website added.

Currently National Media Group owns 82%, and Russian state oil company Gazprom subsidiary SOGAZ owns 18%.

The history of REN TV is connected to the effects of the August Coup, when former heads of Soviet Central Television Irena Lesenskaya and her son Dimitri decided to create their production company. The company was registered under the name «ЛИС и С» («Лесневская Ирена Стефановна и сын») on 19 August 1991, but due to political chaos, as well as a similar name being registered at the time («ЛИС’С», Sergey Lisovskiy), the registration was delayed. Two weeks after the coup the company was registered under the name «REN» (formally registered on 1 October 1991).

Its first programs were Astrological Forecast (13 November 1991, RTR) and the Christmas special The Irony of Fate, or Merry Christmas) (24 December 1991, First Channel of CT SSSR, days before its dissolution). These two were followed by other productions for national channels, such as To Those Who Remember, Rost's Stable, Man-to-Man Talk from Eldar Ryazanov to Boris Yeltsin Dog-Show: Me and My Dog and The White Woodpecker Club. At the time of founding, its staff consisted of only nine people, though ten years later, it rose to over 500.

In the spring of 1996, REN-TV became the main shareholder of JSC Joint Stock Company Accept, a television company that owned a license to broadcast on UHF channel 49 Moscow (occupied at the time by the local channel M—49, launched on 1 January 1994). In May of the same year, the production company REN-TV started work on the creation of its full-blown homonymous television channel. It was assumed that the schedule would consist of its existing original productions. Irena and Dmitry Lesnevsky talked about getting Channel 49 at their own disposal as follows:

Volodya Molchanov and I were in Israel. <...> And there I found a man who said that he had read somewhere in an interview that I dreamed of my own channel. And then this man, who escaped from Russia and once worked for the Ministry of Communications, said that he took a license for himself, he now had a channel in Moscow, but few people watch him — Channel 49. <...> I was given a meeting with this man who said: "I've been waiting for you! People come to me with sacks of money. …

In Ukraine there was a full relay of the channel (including commercials) until 2014, excluding sports broadcasts and erotic programs (during which periods, its signal was suspended). The channel was distributed by the SonaR company from Dnipropetrovsk. In 2008 was suspended alongside Channel One Russia, RTR-Planeta, NTV Mir and TV Center International, after the problems were solved, REN TV resumed operations. In the 2000s and 2010s, REN TV was relayed terrestrially on the following channels:

On 24 July 2014, the National Television and Radio Council decided to ban two Russian television channels that continued news in its output, among them REN TV, as it did not follow the requisites of the European Convention on Transnational Television and Part 1 of Article 42 of the Ukrainian law "On Television and Radio Broadcasting".

In June 2022, broadcasts resumed in parts of Kherson Oblast that were captured by Russia, alongside the appearance of other national channels from the Russian multiplexes.

Since 1 January 2001, REN TV's programs are relayed by Capital TV.

REN TV broadcast to the three Baltic countries until 2005. After that, a new REN TV Baltic channel with a British license was created. It ceased relaying REN TV programs on 10 February 2021.

REN TV was relayed in Moldova until 6 January 2009, the ban was due to several of its original productions lacking rights outside of Russia. In December 2012, Teleproiect SRL obtained a license, creating a new channel, REN Moldova, in 2013.

In Uzbekistan, the channel was banned in 2004 due to the coverage of the situation in the country.

Although the channel never directly catered to India, it was available in the clear via satellite and redistributed to cable television companies. The channel caused a minor scandal in 2004, when its Saturday night block of erotic programming attracted local audiences, similar to what happened to TV-6, which India banned when the channel was still operational.

In November 2005 REN TV fired Olga Romanova, the anchor of its daily 24 news flagship. Despite much publicity around the incident, her independent manner of reporting was continued by Marianna Maksimovskaya, formerly an anchor and news presenter for Vladimir Gusinsky's NTV Station. Maksimovskaya was in charge of news broadcasts on REN TV until 2014, when she was fired. Due to her activities, the channel was arguably Russia's only major TV outlet with liberal views, discussing the problem of state censorship and showing interviews with leaders of the political fringe (including Other Russia).

Prior to her departure from the channel, Romanova had told the Radio Free Europe on 25 November 2005 that the channel's head, Alexander Ordzhonikidze had pulled two recent stories for, she felt, political reasons. One censored item had covered an investigation into Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov's son's involvement in a road accident in which a woman died. Romanova spoken about the alleged censorship on Ekho Moskvy radio on 23 November 2005 – and the next day Ordzhonikidze barred from entering the channel's building. A second 'banned item had been about the building in central Moscow of a US$15 million church and clock tower by Zurab Tsereteli, the International Press Institute noted in its report on 2005.

Ordzhonikidze said in an interview for Echo of Moscow radio station that REN's news output had low ratings and management had decided to try other anchors on the evening newscasts.

In solidarity with Romanova, several of her journalist colleagues quit the channel in December 2005. Head of news and deputy channel director, Yelena Fedorova, told Radio Liberty's Russian Service (Radio Svoboda) why she had resigned.

REN TV has been accused of combining pieces of scientific shows and interviews to produce pseudoscientific "documentaries". In 2015, REN TV's documentaries were awarded "the most harmful pseudoscientific project (for spreading of myths, delusions and superstitions)" antiprize by the Ministry of Education and Science for propaganda of conspiracy theories and mistrust for science.

In October 2024, REN TV reported fictitious birds with human testicles, showing images generated using Midjourney that became an internet meme in early 2024. …

Entertainment, education and documentary programming:

The company which produced several high-profile feature films, notably the Golden Lion-winning Vozvrashcheniye in 2003, is still a production house and has made much of the network's scheduled content, including numerous TV series:

In the past, REN TV aired American TV series, taken from FOX and Sony Pictures Television, including:

Since 2017, REN TV ceased airing TV series of its own production, as its programming line changed drastically.