TMC (Telemontecarlo)

Telemontecarlo, also known by the abbreviation TMC, was the Italian-language television station of the Principality of Monaco which was, in the seventies and early eighties, the main competitor of the RAI public television channels, being one of the foreign television stations in Italian admissible in the Italian peninsula. Its headquarters was located in Monte Carlo at number 16 of the Boulevard Princesse Charlotte, the same site as the French-speaking "sister", born twenty years earlier. After 2000 the building that housed the headquarters of the two Tele Monte Carlo and also of Radio Monte Carlo, both French and Italian, now empty, was torn down to make way for the construction of a Novotel hotel. The French Tele Monte Carlo and Radio Monte Carlo then moved to the new headquarters located at the port and more precisely at the Quai Antoine 1er quay (La Condamine). Since the mid-eighties, Telemontecarlo has increasingly become a niche channel, after the rise of the canals owned by Berlusconi, in particular of Canale 5. In 1990, it obtained the concession to transmit on the whole national territory from the Mammì law. It officially and definitively changed its name in LA7 on 24 June 2001, following its acquisition on 6 August 2000 by Seat Pagine Gialle, a company then belonging to Telecom Italia.