Starting today, RAI TV will offer celebratory graphics for an entire year to celebrate the first 70 years of television and 100 years of radio. January 3 is an important birthday at RAI. It was 2:30 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon when Fulvia Colombo, from the studios on Corso Sempione in Milan, made the first announcement, "Rai, Italian Radio Television, begins today its regular television broadcasting service."

The first program aired was "Arrivi e Partenze", hosted by the very young Italian American Mike Bongiorno from Rome's Ciampino airport, with interviews with celebrities passing through Rome. At 8:45 p.m. the first edition of the news program aired. This was followed by "Teleclub," the comedy "L'osteria della posta" performed by Eduardo De Filippo, "Settenote" devoted to musical entertainment, and then "La Domenica Sportiva".

In the very early days, the programs lasted a total of four hours, starting at 5:30 p.m. with children's TV, stopping then to resume with the news at 8:45 p.m., until closing at 11 p.m. And there were no commercials, introduced in 1957 with Carosello. Then, on November 4, 1961, the Second Program (now Rai 2) would also see the light of day, followed on December 15, 1979 by the Third Network (now Rai 3). Meanwhile, color had already arrived.

Subscribers, at first, numbered 90, rising to twenty-four thousand after the end of the first month of programming and reaching 88 thousand within a year: by the end of 1954 TV was able to reach 58 percent of the population. A figure that should be interpreted as the number of listeners, but not of TV set owners. At that time listeners gathered at a family or public place where some lucky person already had a television set. By the end of the fourth year, subscribers became one million.