he railway line that
connects the coastal city
of Bar with neighbouring
Serbia was among the
most expensive lines to
be built in the world
because of the
challenging terrain. So it’s easy to guess
how difficult and costly it must have
been to put the original transmitters on
Montenegro’s high mountaintops.
Replacing them with new digital
transmitters was a similar feat – it
involved years of planning negotiations,
harmonisation, EU grants, tendering
procedures and actual construction works.
Montenegro’s journey to digital
started some 110 years ago, in 1904 to be
precise, when a signal was sent across the
sea from Bar to Italy. The Montenegrin
ruler at the time, King Nikola I, was an
avid supporter of innovations and with
the assistance of the Italian inventor,
engineer and Nobel prize laureate
Guillermo Marconi installed the first
radio-telegraphic station in this part of
Europe, trying to build more links
between the small kingdom of
Montenegro and the rest of the world.
KEENON INNOVATIONS
Many things have changed since then but
this remains: Montenegrins are still very
keen on innovations. They can at times
seem even too ‘digital’ and it is not
always easy for the small emerging
Balkan economy to keep pace with them
and meet all their cravings for new
digital toys, not even with global players
such as telecommunication operators
Deutsche Telekom and Telenor, which
have been in the country for a long time
now, using Montenegro as a testing
ground for the latest-generation
innovative services.
Apart from new gadgets, Montenegrins
also enjoy their television. Spanish and
Mexican telenovelas, and more recently
regional and local TV production, are
often discussed in cafes for days and
viewers sometimes take the intricate
destinies of Venezuelan protagonists
closer to their heart than the problems of
their own families. There are now fewer
local TV stations broadcasting free-to-air,
leaving the local population at the mercy
of foreign reality shows, which often
tread a fine line between legal and decent
in terms of watershed regulations.
A tourist visiting
Montenegro some
six months ago
could have been
forgiven for asking:
“Why is this small
Mediterranean
country, with only
620,000 people, not
completely digital?”
one of the main
challenges was
posed by its
dramatic landscape,
as Djordje
Vujnovic,
International
Relations Adviser
to the Director at
the Agency for
Electronic Media
of Montenegro,
explains in his
overview of the
media landscape
today
MONTENEGRO
POST-DSO
T
