JioStar to close Comedy Central, Vh1, MTV Beats, Bindass, Star Life, Colors Odia, Star Kiran HD on 15 March

Reliance- and Disney-owned broadcaster JioStar will down the shutters on several of its niche channels and two underperforming Odia-language channels on 15 March 2025 (Saturday), exactly two years after another such series of launches and closures on 15 March 2023. These are Comedy Central, MTV Beats, Vh1 and Star Life (previously Fox Life) in both SD and HD feeds, as well as the SD-only Bindass and Colors Odia — plus the HD feed of the struggling Odia channel Star Kiran, whose SD version will continue — totalling 11 channels in all. Many of these channels, especially those run by the pre-merger Viacom18 like Vh1 and Comedy Central, were on air for a decade or two, and their closure will be acutely felt by large swathes of urban Indians who grew up with them.

While this was never explicitly announced, these channels were excluded from JioStar’s new RIO (Reference Interconnect Offer) document on 13 February 2025, which also stated the launch of many new regional Star Sports 2-branded channels that replace the existing Sports18 channels. Therefore it was a given that they would be shuttered on 15 March, and indeed on 1 March these channels started showing scrolls that they would be discontinued on that day. MTV Beats, Vh1 and Comedy Central later ran campaigns on TV and social media informing viewers of their impending closure and celebrating their special moments.

However, many other niche channels have been spared from closure for the time being, including Colors Infinity, Star Movies, Star Movies Select, Nat Geo, Nat Geo Wild, History TV18, Disney International HD, MTV and all the kids’ channels, which use the Disney Channel, Hungama and Nick brands. Even so, this may not be the last round of closures from JioStar, because several other channels were flagged as required to be sold or closed by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) in October 2024. The fate of those channels — namely Jalsha Movies (Bengali), Colors Marathi, Colors Super (Kannada), Hungama and Super Hungama — hangs in the balance, though no decision has been taken thus far.

Why are so many longstanding JioStar channels being closed?

As crores of Indians, especially youth, have moved to streaming services like JioStar’s own JioHotstar (which replaced Disney+ Hotstar and JioCinema on 14 February) and the music streaming platform JioSaavn — in addition to competitors like YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, SonyLIV, Amazon MX Player and Spotify — JioStar has needed to change its broadcast and streaming strategy drastically. As a result, JioStar no longer finds it sustainable to keep running these channels in genres like English GEC, music and lifestyle, even though it continues to have a smaller presence in these and other niche genres.

Moreover it has been struggling badly in Odia compared to other regional languages, with both Star Kiran (launched in 2022) and the 23-year-old Colors Odia failing to attract audiences. However, only Star Kiran’s HD feed is being axed while the SD feed survives, which will remain its only Odia GEC (general entertainment channel) going forward, since Colors Odia is being closed as well. These changes are a sign of JioStar’s aggressive shift towards launching more sports channels and closing niche and underperforming channels, as it leans heavily on ad revenue from sports and particularly cricket properties — including the IPL, WPL and ICC and BCCI events — to recoup billions of dollars’ worth of investments in global cricket rights.

Below is a table that lists all the channels that will be closed on 15 March 2025, followed by a comprehensive table of all JioStar channels — including History TV18, which was technically not run by the pre-merger Viacom18 — after these closures and the launches of the new Star Sports channels.

1. Star Life is the only one of these channels to have undergone multiple renamings and rebrandings. Its previous names include The History Channel (November 2003), Fox History & Entertainment (November 2008), Fox History & Traveller (May 2011), Fox Traveller (October 2011) and finally Fox Life (June 2014 with a graphics update in February 2018), before becoming Star Life in April 2024 and hence retiring the Fox brand among Disney channels worldwide. The HD feed was launched by the then-Fox Traveller in October 2012. ↩︎

Overall JioStar broadcast portfolio, including History TV18

Over the next few pages we examine how these niche channels’ closures are an irreparable loss to the Indian TV landscape in the 2020s and beyond, especially with the loss of brands as iconic as Vh1, Bindass and Comedy Central in the youth sector — much like Channel V and Star World in years past — as well as JioStar’s failures in Odisha with both Colors Odia and Star Kiran HD.