Several Eastern bloc countries were producing some great movies (the Soviet Union since the 20ies), and also a lot of low-quality movies. Are you interested in this then I can tell a bit more, or is it only direct daily television you want to know about?

East German here. I grew up with East German TV in the 1980s. To answer your question, no. There were movies from other countries including movies from the Soviet Union, but the big majority (around 90% I guess) of what was on East German TV was home-made.

East Germany had a very active film industry, a legend of the old UFA Studios that before and during WWII rivalled Hollywood in size and activity. The studios at Potsdam-Babelsberg near Berlin were re-named DEFA after the war and it was business as usual.

I remember lots of high-quality productions aimed at children, those were politically "safe". Talented screenwriters, actors and directors who had gotten into trouble with the system often ended up doing children's movies and series. Additionally you could often slip things past the censors if you placed your criticism in the world of fairy tales and fantasy.

We also got to see older Hollywood movies from the 1950s, usually unpolitical historical romantic stuff with swordbuckling heros and swooning ladies.

Soviet movies were usually childrens movies from the 1960s and 1970s, especially Russian fairy tales.

There were also lots of co-productions (especially for childrens series) with Czechoslovakian and Polish TV, those sometimes even included co-productions with Swedish, Italian and Spanish TV stations. Czech productions that stick out and that are still on rerun today are Arabela and Pan Tau.

You can sort-of compare it with the situation in the US and the UK. While the BBC could show US productions all day long on all of their 4 channels, Brits prefer to see their tax money go into quality BBC productions. AFAIK British TV is over 80% home-made and only the rest is foreign productions including but not limited to US productions.

What is actually the most interesting in a historical context is the influence West German TV had on East Germans. There have been several studies on this and the conclusion is that coverage of the events in East Germany in 1989 by West German TV stations was a significant factor in the toppling of the East German government.

West Germany has two major news shows, heute (ZDF) at 7 pm and tagesschau (ARD) at 8 pm. Those are a major fixture since the 1960s. East German TV aired their news (called Aktuelle Kamera) at 7:30 pm right between those western news. This was no accident - Aktuelle Kamera often directly referred to the statements made in west German news by "imperialistic agents Claim that" etc. So by watching both West German news and the East German news (first heute from West Germany, then Aktuelle Kamera from East Germany and then tagessschau from West Germany) you knew exactly what was going on. Even the things the government did not want you to know.

In most countries there were only a couple of channels, all of them owned by the state. They were usually broadcasting news services in the evening and sitcoms and movies throughout the day. They were all heavily censored, but also surprisingly well-made and entertaining.

So far a lot of answers here have been removed. Please keep in mind:

1. Comments in /r/askhistorians are expected to be in-depth--simply a sentence listing a few shows and genres does not suffice, and;

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Thanks.