TV Koper, a regional television station based in the Slovenian coastal town of the same name, was established in 1971 to serve Slovenia’s Italian-speaking minority. However, it soon became massively popular across the border in Italy. Known in Italian as Telecapodistria, it broadcast in color at a time when Italian television was still entirely black and white, and it provided a fresh alternative to the Italian monopoly broadcaster RAI. It even aired risqué films.

Soon, Italian entrepreneurs established a network of transmitters that brought TV Koper’s signals to most of Italy, eventually all the way to Sicily. To watch the new stations, Italians bought TV sets that operated using the PAL color standard, dashing the hopes of the French that Italy might adopt France’s SECAM instead.

For a time, TV Koper was even programmed by Silvio Berlusconi’s media empire as a sports station, but the its influence began to wane after Italy’s television landscape was deregulated, and hundreds of local stations were set up. No longer distributed within Italy, TV Koper has returned to its original role: It functions primarily as a minority broadcaster, serving the Italian community in Slovenia and Croatia, as well as the Slovenian community across the border in Italy.