DreamDTH Explains: A guide to East Indian channels (Part 2: Odia, Assamese/Northeast, Bhojpuri)

Assamese and other Northeastern channels

As far as Northeast India is concerned, Assamese is prominent, so to speak, compared to others in the region — Assam is among the most developed states of the ‘Seven Sisters’, with the others lagging, but at the national level even Assam does not get as much attention as most other states. Guwahati, the largest city of Assam — but not the capital, which is the nearby Dispur — is also the largest city in Northeast India by a large distance, but it is fairly small when compared to other East Indian cities like Kolkata and Patna, in addition to other Tier II cities across the country.

The same is true of Assamese TV channels: while on the one hand, no national broadcaster (except for News18 Assam/Northeast) has any presence in Assamese — neither are there any HD channels — on the other, there are still a significant number of Assamese channels, particularly news channels. (However, Zee is considering launching Zee 24 Ghanta Northeast — named after its Bengali news channel, Zee 24 Ghanta — in the near future.) This can hardly be said for other Northeastern states like Meghalaya, Mizoram and Tripura, which have practically nothing other than Doordarshan channels, apart from a couple of state-specific channels like Hornbill TV and NLTV in Nagaland.

While nowhere as big as even other well-established language-specific broadcasters like ETV in Telugu, Ortel in Odia or PTC in Punjabi, Assamese still does have a handful of strong local broadcasters as outlined below, with channels like Rang TV, DY 365 and News Live being launched in the 2000s and continuing strong in the absence of national competitors. There is only one music channel and two movie channels, and zero devotional channels — despite some Northeastern states like Nagaland, Mizoram and Meghalaya predominantly following Christianity, and others like Assam, Manipur and Tripura being Hindu-majority. All Assamese channels are expectedly based in Guwahati, while DD channels serving other Northeastern states are based in the Doordarshan kendras in the corresponding cities, like Aizawl in Mizoram, Imphal in Manipur or Agartala in the Bengali-speaking Tripura.

None of the Assamese broadcasters has any streaming or catch-up TV service like other regional networks do elsewhere — such as ETV Win in Telugu or Manorama Max in Malayalam — as their scale is too small to warrant monetisation through OTT platforms, and YouTube remains their sole digital medium. Strangely, Tata Play, India’s largest pay DTH operator, does not have a category for Assamese channels — instead lumping them under ‘Others’ along with channels for other small regions like Nepal 1, the first and only Indian-run channel for the Indian Nepali community.

Table of major Assamese broadcasters

Independent Assamese channels and other Northeastern channels

• Doordarshan’s Northeastern channels: DD Assam, DD Arun Prabha (Arunachal Pradesh), DD Manipur, DD Kohima (Nagaland), DD Mizoram, DD Meghalaya, DD Gangtok (Sikkim), plus DD Agartala (Tripura) which is a Bengali-language channel.
• Assamese movies: Popular TV
• Assamese news: Assam Talks, Pratidin Time, Pratham Khabar (formerly News Time Assam), DA News Plus, ND24 (News Daily 24), NB News; upcoming: Zee 24 Ghanta Northeast
• Channel for Nagaland: Hornbill TV (plus NLTV above)
• Nepali GEC for Nepalis in India: Nepal 1

Interestingly, unlike in most other regional languages, Assamese news channels do not show only news; they also air local movies at noon, music programming and reality shows during non-prime-time hours — in addition to covering cultural events like Bihu, the harvest festival of Assam. News18 Assam/Northeast is also known for airing coverage of football events like the ISL (Indian Super League) whose broadcast rights shifted from Disney Star to Viacom18 in 2023 — which is natural given the significant popularity of football in Assam (as well as West Bengal, and Kerala in the south) compared to most other parts of the country which heavily favour cricket.

Historically shunned by national networks, as local ones take centre stage

The three largest broadcasters: AM Television, Pride East, Brahmaputra

For most of the 2000s, DD Northeast — which was converted to DD Assam in 2019, along with the launch of Doordarshan channels for other Northeastern states — was one of the only channels covering not only Assam but the broader Northeastern region of the country, while the honour of the oldest Assam-specific news channel falls to Prag News, which was launched by AM Television Pvt. Ltd. all the way back on 4 March 2001. The company later launched a general entertainment channel, Rengoni, on 3 June 2013, but has not expanded beyond these two channels. Like most Assamese channels, they are free-to-air, since they lack the distribution and packaging clout that big national broadcasters have. Moreover, the company operates a cable-only music channel, Prag Music, which is not available on satellite.

However, while AM Television may be the oldest Assamese broadcaster, the largest — though small on a national scale — is indisputably Pride East Entertainments: it was founded in 2008 by Riniki Bhuyan Sarma, wife of Assam’s current Chief Minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma, and she remains its Chairman and Managing Director. The company’s first channel was News Live, launched on 21 January 2008, which remains the most popular Assamese news channel, while its GEC Rang TV went on air on 1 October 2009, which is similarly the largest GEC in Assam — though its viewership is very small in absolute terms compared to other languages’ GECs.

On Rang TV’s second birthday in October 2011, the music channel Ramdhenu was launched, which remains the only satellite music channel in any Northeastern language, not counting Prag Music as mentioned above. Two years later in 2013, another news channel — but a Hindi and English one this time, for greater focus on the Northeastern region — followed: North East Live. Finally, on 15 April 2017, Pride East launched its movie channel Indradhanu, one of only two Assamese movie channels — along with Popular TV, which is present on DD Free Dish — cementing it as the largest Northeast Indian network.

Another noteworthy competitor, and the third of the three major broadcasters in Assam, is Brahmaputra Tele Productions: while (like AM Television) it operates only two Assamese channels, it is as significant as the others. Its news channel DY 365 was launched on 30 October 2008, and in 2014 it launched the GEC Jonakk, which was renamed shortly thereafter to Jonack, meaning firefly. In 2021 it also ventured into Nagaland by launching NLTV, the second satellite news channel in that state, after Hornbill TV, which is an English- and Hindi-language channel.

Other local broadcasters in Assam

More recently, a fourth Assamese GEC was launched: the news channel NKTV 24×7 was launched in 2021 — in the same year as others like DA News Plus and News Daily 24 (ND24) — and in late 2022 NKTV launched its GEC, Spondon, adding competition to a small but stable market, before launching NKTV Bangla in 2023.

Also, there are a number of independent Assamese news channels: in addition to recent launches mentioned above like DA News Plus and ND24, some other established names include Pratidin Time (owned by the newspaper Asomiya Pratidin) and Assam Talks, both launched in 2015; and Pratham Khabar, which was known as News Time Assam — with a similar logo as News Time Bangla — before rebranding in 2022. In addition, the Hindi and English news channel NE News was launched in 2019 as a joint venture between Prag News and the ITV Network (which operates the India News channels and NewsX nationally) — much like North East Live from Pride East Entertainments. Both NE News and North East Live go beyond Assam and cover the entire Northeastern region, and the India Today group also has a dedicated platform, India Today NE, for this purpose.

Moreover, a handful of Assamese channels have shut down in the past, including Focus NE (originally NE TV, the first private channel for Northeast India, launched in 2003) and Focus Hi Fi, which both closed in 2015 — along with other Focus-branded channels like Focus Bangla and Focus Odia, the latter of which became Nandighosha TV. Another casualty is the Assamese version of the kids’ channel ETV Bal Bharat, along with the closure of all other non-South Indian ETV Bal Bharat channels — but Assamese and 11 other language audio feeds remain available on the main ETV Bal Bharat channel, an outstanding commitment to one of the smallest of India’s major regional languages from a big network.

The final regional language in Eastern India (actually a dialect of Hindi) is Bhojpuri, spread across Bihar and Jharkhand, which has a distinctly rural aesthetic that is reflected in its DD Free Dish-concentrated viewership — and one that did not have its own TV channels until the late 2000s, when broadcasters started to treat it as more than simply a dialect of Hindi and gave it its own due.