TV Rain was launched in 2010 by Natalya Sindeyeva, a Russian media entrepreneur who put her own money into it after selling a country house, and by Vera Krichevskaya, a documentary director. The motto was 'talk about important things with those who are important to us.' The slogan was 'Optimistic Channel.' It looked, at first, like the kind of brave-but-tolerated outlet that Russia under Dmitry Medvedev still permitted. Medvedev visited the newsroom in 2011. Then the December 2011 election protests began, and TV Rain became one of the few channels actually covering them. By 10 December that year its on-screen logo wore the white ribbon of the protest movement - Sindeyeva called it a gesture of 'sincerity,' not propaganda. The Kremlin took notice.

In late January 2014 TV Rain ran an online poll about the Siege of Leningrad - whether the city should have been surrendered to save the lives of the civilians starving inside. Within days, the largest Russian cable providers had cut the channel. Putin's press secretary Dmitry Peskov said TV Rain had 'crossed more than a law.' The St. Petersburg legislature asked the Prosecutor General to investigate. The poll itself was a pretext, almost certainly; two months earlier the channel had aired Alexei Navalny investigating senior officials including Vyacheslav Volodin. Cut off from cable, TV Rain raised its subscription price, ran a telemarathon, and kept broadcasting online. In August 2021 the Russian Ministry of Justice designated it a 'foreign agent,' a Soviet-flavored label that required every broadcast and social media post to carry a stigmatizing tag. The channel kept going. Then came February 2022.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, the Kremlin moved within days to lock down what remained of independent Russian-language media. On 1 March 2022 the Prosecutor General accused TV Rain of spreading 'deliberately false information' about the Russian military. On 2 March, editor-in-chief Tikhon Dzyadko announced that he and several colleagues had left the country. On 3 March, with the new war censorship law about to make criminal what they did every day, the crew said goodbye on air. They walked off set. The cameras held the empty studio. Then Swan Lake played. The crew scattered: some to Tbilisi, some to Riga, some to Istanbul, some to Berlin. The channel went silent on Russian airwaves and kept broadcasting only on YouTube, where the audience that wanted to hear it could still find it through VPN.

Latvia gave TV Rain a broadcasting license in June 2022, and by July the channel was on the air again from a studio in Riga. The honeymoon was short. On 1 December an anchor named Alexey Korostelev appealed on air for viewers to share information about Russian mobilization, saying the channel hoped 'we can help many service members, for example, with equipment and basic amenities at the front.' The phrasing landed badly with Ukrainian audiences, and the Latvian media regulator - already irritated by a previous broadcast that had shown a map of Russian-annexed Crimea as part of Russia and referred to the Russian military as 'our army' - reacted forcefully. Korostelev was fired the next day. Three colleagues quit in protest. On 6 December the regulator pulled the channel's license entirely, citing 'threats to national security and public order.' Reporters Without Borders pleaded for restraint. Meduza, the other major Russian-exile newsroom in Riga, called the decision 'an incredible gift to the Russian authorities.' Within a month, the Netherlands stepped in. On 9 January 2023, Dzyadko announced that TV Rain had a Dutch broadcasting license. The editorial center moved to Amsterdam.

From Amsterdam, TV Rain has continued the work that got it banned at home: daily news, interviews, the long-running show Here and Now, documentaries about how the country's free press was dismantled in real time. In 2022 the channel received the Peabody Journalistic Integrity Award. In 2024 the documentary My Undesirable Friends: Part I assembled footage of TV Rain, Echo of Moscow, and Novaya Gazeta in the months before the Kremlin came for them all. In July 2023, the Russian government formally branded TV Rain an 'undesirable organization,' the legal designation that makes any cooperation with the channel a crime inside Russia. In July 2025 a Latvian court reversed the 2022 revocation of its license there. The studio stays in Amsterdam. The signal still finds its way back across the border, on YouTube and on satellite, to the audience that needs it most.