Television in India

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The television industry in India is very diverse and produces thousands of programmes in many Indian languages. Nearly 87% Indian households own a television. As of 2016, the country had over 900 channels of which 184 were pay channels. National channels operate in Hindi and English, in addition to channels in several other languages including Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Assamese, Gujarati, Urdu, Bhojpuri, Kashmiri, Konkani and Haryanvi, among others. The Hindi, Telugu and Tamil language television industries are by far the largest television industries in India.

The national television broadcaster is Doordarshan, owned by Prasar Bharati. There are several commercial television broadcasters such as Culver Max Entertainment (Sony Pictures Networks), Disney Star, Viacom18 (owned by Reliance Industries through Network18 Group), Warner Bros. Discovery India and Zee Entertainment Enterprises, at the national level, and Sun TV Network and ETV Network at the regional level.

Currently, the major Hindi national general entertainment channels (GECs) that dominate pay television are StarPlus, Sony SAB, Sony Entertainment Television, Zee TV and Colors TV. Since 2019, free-to-air Hindi channels like Dangal and Goldmines have drastically increased in popularity due to their availability on DD Free Dish. Regional-language channels like Sun TV and Star Vijay (Tamil), Star Maa and Zee Telugu (Telugu), Asianet (Malayalam) and Star Pravah (Marathi) are also among the most popular television channels by viewership.^[1]

Unlike most other countries, major Indian entertainment channels do not air news, with some exceptions in South India like Sun TV and ETV. This is partly due to Indian media regulations prohibiting Foreign Direct Investment of more than 26% in print and broadcast news, and foreign-owned broadcasters like Star have exited news broadcast. Some broadcasters (such as ABP Group, India Today Group, TV9 and ITV Network) operate only news channels, while others (like NDTV and The Times Group) have both news and non-news channels, while Zee Media Corporation and Network18 Group operate independently of the Zee and Viacom18 entertainment channels, which have foreign shareholdings.