Radio Luxembourg

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Radio Luxembourg" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (March 2012) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Radio Luxembourg was a multilingual commercial broadcaster in Luxembourg. It is known in most non-English languages as RTL (for Radio Television Luxembourg).

The English-language service of Radio Luxembourg began in 1933 as one of the earliest commercial radio stations broadcasting to both the UK and Ireland. The station provided a way to circumvent British legislation which until 1973 gave the BBC a monopoly of radio broadcasting on UK territory and prohibited all forms of advertising over the domestic radio spectrum. It boasted the most powerful privately owned transmitter in Europe (200 kW, broadcasting on long wave). In the late 1930s, and again in the 1950s and 1960s, it had large audiences across Britain and Ireland with its programmes of popular entertainment, and was an important forerunner of pirate radio and modern commercial radio in Britain.

Radio Luxembourg's parent company, RTL Group, continued its involvement in broadcasts to a UK audience with the British TV channel then known as Five until it was sold in July 2010.