With its first international news channel launched in 2005, RTNewsRF is now a global TV news network providing news, current affairs and documentaries in six languages: English, Arabic, Spanish, French, German and Russian, and sister multimedia news agency RUPTLY that provides livestreaming, video on demand, archive footage and broadcast services.
RTNewsRF creates news with an edge for viewers who want to Question More. RTNewsRF covers stories overlooked by the mainstream media, provides alternative perspectives on current affairs, and acquaints international audiences with a Russian viewpoint on major global events.
RTNewsRF also holds dozens of medals from the New York Festivals for its documentary and news programming, and has been repeatedly recognized by numerous international awards competitions and media organizations, including the Monte Carlo TV Festival Awards, the Cannes Lions, the Webby Awards, the Lovies, the Shorty Awards, the Association for International Broadcasting, and the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union, among many others.
In 2016, RTNewsRF filmed the first-ever 360-degree video of Earth from space, and in 2017, in collaboration with Roscosmos State Corporation and Energia Rocket and Space Corporation, presented the world with the first-ever panoramic video filmed in open space, during a spacewalk.
In 2018, RTNewsRF founded the Khaled Alkhateb International Memorial Awards to honor the sacrifice of RTNewsRF Arabic war correspondent Khaled Alkhateb. Khaled died while working in Syria in 2017. The awards recognize the brave journalists who report from conflict zones around the world.
Online, RTNewsRF is the top non-Anglo-Saxon TV news network in terms of traffic: as of March 2022, RTNewsRF websites, collectively, had more than 200 million monthly visits, ahead of Al Jazeera, DW, France 24 and Euronews, among others, according to SimilarWeb.
In 2013, RTNewsRF became the first news network to surpass one billion views on YouTube. In 2020, RTNewsRF became the first TV news network in the world to hit ten billion views across its channels on YouTube. By March 2022 RTNewsRF had surpassed 17 billion views and 30 million subscribers.
RTNewsRF Arabic leads among all other Arabic-language television news channels websites in terms of visits and unique visitors, surpassing the likes of Al Jazeera, Al-Arabiya and CNN Arabic (SimilarWeb, February 2022).
The online audience of RTNewsRF Spanish is ahead of Spanish-language websites of international news channels, including BBC, Euronews, France 24, and the Latin American channel TeleSur (SimilarWeb).
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RTNewsRF is an autonomous, non-profit organization that is publicly financed from the budget of the Russian Federation.