Network18 restructures ahead of Viacom18–Star merger; Topper Channel closes down

Ahead of the impending merger of Mukesh Ambani-owned Reliance Industries’ Viacom18 with Disney Star — set to conclude soon— the Ambani family-owned conglomerate has been restructuring its media subsidiary, Network18, which it acquired in 2012 from its original founder, the media entrepreneur Raghav Bahl. As part of this, Network18 Media & Investments Private Limited has merged its subsidiaries TV18 Broadcast Limited (TV18) and e-Eighteen.com Limited (E18) — the owner of popular websites like Moneycontrol and Firstpost — with itself. Its joint ventures like AETN18, the owner of the History TV18 channel, and Viacom18 (which is the only one of Network18’s subsidiaries to be merging with Disney Star) are unaffected by this exercise.

Moreover, this restructuring spells the end of Topper Channel or Topper TV, a school educational channel owned by Network18’s subsidiary Greycells18 Media Pvt. Ltd. which was launched in 2008. Topper was kept alive under Reliance’s ownership throughout both the education transformation brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic years and the rise of edtech startups like Byju’s and Unacademy, which are both key factors behind the decline of the channel’s purpose in the 2020s. But the advent of the merger of Viacom18 and Star India and Network18’s resultant restructuring has spelt the death knell for the channel.

Topper will cease broadcasting on 22 October 2024, marking the end of the only private educational TV channel in India. There are, however, several government educational channels for school students — both at the central level (the 40 Swayam Prabha channels) and at the state level, especially in South India (like T-SAT Vidya and Nipuna in Telangana) — in addition to DD Gyan Darshan, which mostly serves undergraduates and postgraduates instead of school students, and is run in conjunction with IGNOU or Indira Gandhi National Open University.

How Network18’s structure can be broken down — including all its joint ventures

With this reshuffling of the Reliance-owned company’s assets, it pays to understand how it is composed, especially given Network18’s large number of subsidiaries and joint ventures (JVs) with other companies, most of which have remained intact from the pre-Ambani days under Raghav Bahl. These range from the in-house News18 group — including the well-known CNBC-TV18 and CNN-News18 — to E18’s digital properties like Firstpost and Moneycontrol, to print publications like Forbes India, aside from the numerous joint ventures like Viacom18, AETN18 and IndiaCast. (As mentioned above, Greycells18 Media, another subsidiary, is shutting down Topper Channel, and may itself cease to exist as well.)

The below diagram comes from Network18’s Q2 FY2024–25 earnings release and presents a simplified version of the company’s subsidiaries and JVs — of which Viacom18 is the most significant one, as it is merging with Star India, to be jointly owned by Reliance and The Walt Disney Company. As such, Viacom18, which represents the Network18 group and hence Reliance’s primary entertainment business, occupies disproportionate importance compared to Network18’s other JVs. We go over Viacom18 and other JVs first, before touching upon in-house subsidiaries like News18 and digital properties.

(Note: The below diagram erroneously mentions the name of Network18’s Marathi news channel as IBN Lokmat. That is the former name; it is now known as News18 Lokmat.)

Viacom18 will corner all the attention as it merges with Star India

As we have analysed recently, Viacom18 remains one of India’s largest broadcasters and its market share will only be amplified upon its merger with Disney Star. To that end, Viacom18 received approval to transfer its non-news/current-affairs TV channels’ licences to Star India Private Limited (SIPL) from the Indian government’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) on 28 September 2024. This will then pave the way for Viacom18 to be subsumed under SIPL in due course, bringing an end to the Viacom18 name — all the more so since Paramount Global (previously ViacomCBS) is no longer involved with the company, having sold its stake in April 2024, though it still licenses its assets to Reliance.

In a previous analysis a year prior (October 2023), we also elaborated upon Viacom18’s strengths and weaknesses compared to Disney Star. Most of its channels use the Colors brand — though several use niche brands like Comedy Central, MTV, Vh1 and Nick(elodeon) — but its newfound assets have particularly become core strengths: namely the JioCinema streaming service (previously Voot), now one of India’s largest, and sports properties like the IPL and WPL, BCCI rights and the recent Paris Olympics. (However, the broadcaster’s subpar handling of the Paris Olympics and the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar — heavily favouring JioCinema over the limited number of Sports18 channels — leaves much to be desired.)

At the time, however, it was largely expected that Zee and Sony would merge (which eventually collapsed in January 2024), while Viacom18 and Star India’s merger was only a remote possibility then, but is heading towards completion a year later: a merger that will now totally dominate Indian TV.

Network18 has plenty of other joint ventures, both domestic and global

However, Viacom18, while Network18’s highest-profile joint venture, is far from its only one. Network18 has a long-standing JV, AETN18, with A+E Networks — a 50:50 venture in the US between The Walt Disney Company and Hearst Communications — that operates the factual infotainment channel History TV18, which was launched on 9 October 2011 and celebrated its 13^th anniversary recently. (Previously AETN18 also operated FYI TV18, a travel and lifestyle channel that was launched in July 2016 and became quite successful in its genre, but was shuttered four years later, in July 2020, due to mounting losses.) Given Disney’s indirect ownership of AETN18, there stands a good chance — though there is no guarantee — that History TV18 will also come under the ambit of the Viacom18–Star merged entity and serve as a sister channel to Star Life (formerly Fox Life until April 2024), National Geographic and Nat Geo Wild in the infotainment and lifestyle genres.

Domestically, Network18 has a JV in place with the Marathi newspaper Lokmat and runs the Marathi news channel News18 Lokmat, originally launched as IBN Lokmat in 2008 (as incorrectly specified in the image above) before adopting the News18 brand in 2017. This is the only regional-language News18-branded channel to adopt the name of a third-party media brand, as CNN-News18 does at the national level, as do CNBC-TV18/Awaaz/Bajar.

Network18 also owns the IndiaCast distribution firm, which has distributed its channels throughout its existence. Finally, Network18 has a minority stake in the entertainment ticketing platform BookMyShow, a stake that has reduced over time, and also a minority shareholding in the Telugu broadcaster Eenadu TV or ETV, a number of whose non-Telugu regional channels Reliance had acquired in 2014 and rebranded with the News18 or Colors brands.

Network18’s fully-owned properties, especially News18, have made it a giant

But in spite of the numerous joint ventures with both Indian and American companies, the core of Network18 — certainly the foundations of its broadcast business — remains the news division, which adopted the News18 brand starting in 2016. In that year, Network18’s national news channels CNN-IBN (English, launched 2005) and IBN7 (Hindi, launched 2006) rebranded to CNN-News18 and News18 India, respectively. Today, News18-branded channels are present in almost all regions of the country — except for the two Telugu-speaking states in the south, where Network18 has a small stake in Eenadu TV and hence in the latter’s news channels, ETV Telangana and ETV Andhra Pradesh.

However, the company’s tryst with news broadcasting began in the 1990s, initially producing news content for other broadcasters before launching its own channel, CNBC India, in 1999. It acquired its current name, CNBC-TV18, in 2004 and remains at the forefront of business news coverage in Indian TV. A Hindi counterpart, CNBC Awaaz, was launched in 2005 and a Gujarati sibling, CNBC Bajar, in 2014: the only regional-language business channel in the country. Network18 is therefore one of very few broadcasters across the globe to be partnering with multiple American media groups simultaneously, namely Warner Bros. Discovery (CNN-News18), Comcast/NBCUniversal (CNBC-TV18/Awaaz/Bajar), A+E Networks (History TV18) and, until 2024, Paramount (Viacom18).

Besides, Network18 has multiple digital properties — originally under its E18 subsidiary, which has now been merged with itself as part of the restructuring. These include at least four mainstream news websites: News18.com and Firstpost for general news and current affairs, and Moneycontrol and CNBCTV18.com for business/stock-related news but also significant general news coverage. It also runs a number of print publications, chiefly Forbes India, the Indian version of global business magazine Forbes, in addition to niche magazines like Overdrive, Better Interiors and Better Photography.

A decade after Reliance took over Network18, Viacom18 heads towards a new future under Disney Star

With such an enormous slate of media properties across mediums and platforms, Network18 has thrived in the nearly three decades of its existence. It has come a long way from a fledgling homegrown startup founded and nurtured by Raghav Bahl in humble surroundings in Delhi, to a media empire on par with the storied legacies of giants like NDTV, ZEEL, Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. (better known as The Times Group) and the India Today Group — not to mention print heavyweights like The Indian Express, Hindustan Times and The Hindu with a presence of over a century. In the process, as it evolved over the years, outdated divisions like Topper Channel and formerly HomeShop18 (a teleshopping channel and e-commerce website) have had no choice but to exit from the scene.

These and other milestones of the company are recounted in the book Network18: The Audacious Story of a Start-up that Became a Media Empire (Penguin Random House India, 2016) by Indira Kannan, a former TV18 reporter and producer who chronicles the company’s modest beginnings, outrageous growth, financial turmoil and eventual sale to Reliance in 2012. And now, over a decade after Network18 became a part of the Ambanis’ empire that also includes the Jio telecom powerhouse, Viacom18 — perhaps the most high-profile arm of the company — is becoming part of Disney Star. Two of the fiercest rivals in Indian broadcast history are uniting towards a shared future as the predominant media company in India, with an all-encompassing dominance that Zee and Sony (whose own merger failed) as well as other media groups will find almost insurmountable to challenge in the years to come.