DreamDTH Explains: A guide to West Indian regional channels (Marathi and Gujarati)

History of Marathi television channels

The main GECs and movie channels of Maharashtra

Traditionally, Zee Marathi was the most popular GEC in the language, since it was the oldest private Marathi channel to be launched back on Independence Day (15 August) 1999 as Alpha TV Marathi — a month before Zee Bangla, initially Alpha TV Bangla before they both adopted the Zee brand in 2005. In July 2000, ETV Marathi became the second and rebranded to Colors Marathi on 22 March 2015 — on Gudi Padwa, the Marathi New Year — upon its acquisition by Reliance-owned Viacom18. Hot on the heels of the launch of Star Jalsha in Bengali in September 2008 — which was Star’s first regional channel to be launched from scratch, instead of being acquired (as was the case with Star Vijay, Asianet and Suvarna) — Star launched Star Pravah on 24 November 2008, which would remain its only Marathi channel for over a decade (not counting the short-lived Star Sports 1 Marathi) even as it launched movie channels in other languages. On 1 May 2016, Star Pravah HD became the first Marathi HD channel, a day before Colors Marathi HD went on air.

Speaking of movie channels, Zee Talkies was launched on 25 August 2007 and remained the only Marathi movie channel from a national broadcaster well into the 2020s, aside from being Zee’s first regional HD channel in any language and genre to launch an HD feed in October 2016 — a month before Zee Marathi HD and Zee Bangla HD went on air. It was only in May 2022 that Disney Star launched Pravah Picture in both SD and HD, nearly a decade after its Bengali counterpart Jalsha Movies in December 2012. These two are the only Marathi movie channels from big broadcasters since Viacom18 has none — even though Colors Marathi Cinema had been rumoured for some time. Both Zee Talkies and Pravah Picture have HD feeds, in contrast to Bengali where only Jalsha Movies is available in HD, and Zee Bangla Cinema and Colors Bangla Cinema are not.

Zee’s other Marathi channels are Zee Yuva, a secondary GEC-cum-movie channel launched in August 2016 which is not very popular, and Zee Chitramandir, a movie channel exclusively for DD Free Dish viewers — its only channel not available on pay DTH and cable platforms — launched in April 2021. Zee also launched its own Marathi music channel, Zee Vajwa, on 17 October 2020 — exactly a year before Sun Marathi’s launch — only to shutter it after a little over a year in March 2022, leaving Zing in Hindi as its only music/youth channel in any language. Before Zee Chitramandir, there was briefly another Marathi movie channel on DD Free Dish called Chitrapat Marathi — from the same company that operates the Manoranjan free-to-air channels and Khushboo Bangla — but it could not last for a long time.

Not to be left behind, Sony Pictures Networks (now Culver Max Entertainment) ventured into only its second regional market on 19 August 2018 with Sony Marathi and has remained content with just two regional languages before the Zee merger — with Sony Aath in Bengali being its only other regional channel. Interestingly, unlike other big Marathi GECs, Sony Marathi has abandoned plans for launching an HD feed. The Sun network followed suit on 17 October 2021 with Sun Marathi — exactly a year after the erstwhile Zee Vajwa, and two-and-a-half years after Sun Bangla was launched in February 2019 — and both Sun channels soft-launched their HD feeds recently. Sun Marathi HD and Sun Bangla HD have been added on Sun Direct and Tata Play before the end of 2023, with the official launch scheduled in early 2024 along with that of Sun Neo, a Hindi GEC.

Smaller Marathi GECs, music and movie channels

Besides the big names among Marathi GECs like Zee Marathi, Star Pravah and the then-ETV Marathi (now Colors Marathi), there was a noteworthy local player for almost a decade: Mi Marathi from Sri Adhikari Brothers, now also known as SABGroup. The company launched its Hindi GEC, SAB TV, in 1999 and sold it to Sony in 2005, transforming it into today’s Sony Sab — though SAB TV remains the channel’s X (Twitter) handle. As far as Marathi is concerned, Sri Adhikari Brothers launched Mi Marathi in March 2007, and it was a small but successful Marathi GEC for half a decade, with both serials and news. In 2012 it changed hands and was sold, before adopting a news-first approach in 2014, but it continued to bleed money — not being able to keep up with big news players like ABP Majha — and eventually disappeared from TV platforms in 2017.

Music broadcasters took their time to enter Maharashtra: three small networks launched Marathi music channels over the years — 9X Media’s 9X Jhakaas in 2011, Sri Adhikari Brothers’ Maiboli in 2013 and Media Worldwide’s Sangeet Marathi in 2015. Of these, 9X Media — which also operates 9XM (popular film songs) and 9X Jalwa (classic film songs) in Hindi, and 9X Tashan in Punjabi — is a small but established music-specific broadcaster with a long-standing presence, launching 9X Jhakaas in October 2011, two months after 9X Tashan in August. Similarly, Media Worldwide Pvt. Ltd. — another music-focused broadcaster — launched Sangeet Bangla in 2005, Music India (Hindi popular film songs) in 2006 and Sangeet Bhojpuri in 2008, but only in 2015 did Sangeet Marathi hit the airwaves.

Meanwhile, SABGroup, whose most famous channel is the Hindi music channel Mastiii, entered the Marathi music market with Maiboli in 2013 — though it also has non-music channels like Dabangg, a Bhojpuri movie channel. In the late 2010s, there was also an independent Marathi music channel, Zingaat, but this was short-lived — much like Zee Vajwa. The free-to-air Enterr10 Network — best known for its Hindi GEC Dangal, one of India’s top 5 channels — launched Fakt Marathi (meaning ‘only Marathi’; initially Aapla Talkies) in 2016, which was originally a movie channel before shifting to a mixed schedule of serials and movies, like its Bengali sibling Enterr10 Bangla.

Shemaroo Entertainment, one of India’s oldest film distribution and content companies, launched the free-to-air movie channel Shemaroo MarathiBana in January 2020, breaking more than a decade of monopoly by Zee Talkies. In reply, Zee Chitramandir was launched in April 2021 exclusively for DD Free Dish, but only with Pravah Picture’s launch in 2022 did Zee Talkies gain a pay competitor. Moreover, QYOU Media — which operates a free-to-air Hindi channel named The Q, also for DD Free Dish audiences but with a youth-oriented, unconventional schedule — launched Q Marathi in March 2022, which was briefly added by pay DTH platforms but removed thereafter due to lack of popularity.

News channels in Maharashtra

National broadcasters: ABP, Zee, News18, TV9

It was only in 2007 that Maharashtra saw its first 24-hour news channels being launched. Zee 24 Taas was launched on 10 February 2007 followed by Star Majha which was launched on 22 June 2007 — two years after Star Ananda in Bengali was launched in 2005 — as a joint venture between Star and West Bengal’s ABP Group, which operates multiple print publications in both Bengali and English. On 1 June 2012, Star exited the news business and its three news channels rebranded using the ABP brand; thus, Star Majha became ABP Majha, while Star News (Hindi) and Star Ananda became ABP News and ABP Ananda. To this day, ABP Majha remains the number one Marathi news channel by viewership. (Later, ABP Asmita (Gujarati), ABP Sanjha (Punjabi) and ABP Ganga (Uttar Pradesh) were launched, but the latter two discontinued their broadcast feeds in 2023 and shifted to an online-only presence. All ABP channels underwent a big rebrand in December 2020, with a new logo scheme, and moved their logos from the usual top right to the rare bottom left corner of the screen.)

With Zee being so aggressive with its Marathi channels, it is no wonder that it was so quick to launch a Marathi news channel: Zee 24 Taas, also in 2007 — the same year as Zee Talkies. The following year (2008) saw two newspapers in Maharashtra launch their TV channels. On the occasion of Gudi Padwa (the Marathi New Year) on 6 April 2008, the Lokmat newspaper launched IBN Lokmat as a joint venture with Network18 — and this was the only regional news channel to use the erstwhile IBN brand, which was also used by CNN-IBN in English and IBN7 in Hindi (both launched 2005) before they switched to the News18 brand in 2016. On 6 November 2017, IBN Lokmat followed suit and was renamed to News18 Lokmat, some months before Network18’s other news channels adopted the News18 brand in 2018.

The other Marathi daily to launch a TV channel in 2008 was the Sakal newspaper, which launched Saam TV on Independence Day (15 August) 2008, initially as a GEC with some news content — similar to Mi Marathi — but it repositioned itself as a pure news channel in 2018. The TV9 Network, which had already had channels for Telugu, Kannada and Gujarati, launched the Mumbai-centric Hindi channel TV9 Mumbai in January 2009, which later expanded to the whole of Maharashtra and became TV9 Marathi. TV9’s focus remained largely confined to these four languages until the launches of TV9 Bharatvatsh (its national Hindi news channel) in 2019 and TV9 Bangla in 2021, giving it a pan-Indian status on par with ABP, News18 and the like. Even NDTV — which thus far stayed away from regional channels, but recently launched NDTV Madhya Pradesh and NDTV Rajasthan — is planning to launch NDTV Marathi and Gujarati in the short term, with other languages also in the pipeline.

Smaller independent Marathi news channels

There are also a handful of small Marathi news channels with independent ownership, which are fewer in number compared to other languages like Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali and even Odia and Assamese. Jai Maharashtra was launched in May 2013 by Sahana Group and has held steady as an independent news channel, while Lokshahi News went on air more recently, in January 2020. News State Maharashtra/Goa was launched in 2022 by the same group that runs News Nation and several News State channels in Hindi-speaking states. Much more recently, another Marathi newspaper, Pudhari, launched Pudhari News in August 2023 and it was quickly added by leading DTH platforms.

A noteworthy independent Marathi news channel that later ceased broadcasting was Maharashtra1, which was launched in January 2016 by the Sadhna Group, which also had several other Hindi news channels at the time. Its editor-in-chief was the veteran journalist Nikhil Wagle — over a year after he resigned from the then-IBN Lokmat in 2014 and joined the erstwhile Mi Marathi, before putting in his papers there as well. However, by the end of 2016, Wagle himself had quit Maharashtra1 as well, and by the middle of 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the channel had ceased to exist. In the past, some smaller Marathi news channels like AM News and MKN have also briefly been carried by TV platforms.

With this comprehensive look at Marathi TV channels, past and present, on the next page, we will see how Zee Marathi’s fall has been Star Pravah’s gain by leaps and bounds — despite Zee investing so much resources behind its Marathi channels — even as Colors Marathi, Sony Marathi and Sun Marathi are all fighting for a slice of the viewership pie in one of India’s most hotly contested regional markets. And this is in the absence of strong local broadcasters like the Raj, Jaya and Kalaignar networks in Tamil, ETV in Telugu, Ortel in Odia and PTC in Punjabi — or the competition would have been even more intense!