Star and Viacom18’s mega-merger: How will Reliance and Disney disrupt India?

What will Star and Viacom18’s combined linear TV portfolio look like?

Much like with the failed merger of Zee and Sony, the combined Star–Viacom18 entity has several overlaps in the top-line Hindi GEC and movie genres, as well as sports and several regional languages. However, it is always Star that has had the bigger presence out of the two: be it the broadcaster’s biggest money-spinner and ratings-raker Star Plus, or the Star Gold bouquet of Hindi movie channels, or top-ranking regional GECs like Star Maa, Star Pravah, Star Jalsha and Asianet, or the immense Star Sports network, Star’s mainline channels have always left Viacom18’s equivalent Colors-branded channels in the shade. Most of Viacom18’s regional channels have indeed been very dismal, with the exceptions of Colors Kannada, once the leader of the Kannada GEC sector, and Colors Gujarati, which enjoys a competition-free monopoly. Nevertheless, Colors, Viacom18’s flagship Hindi GEC, has enjoyed vast popularity — far more than Zee TV and Sony TV.

But when it comes to niche genres like English GEC/movies and music, the overlap is much less, with only one of the two usually having a presence. This is all the more true because Star all but exited the English GEC space in 2023 by closing the Star World channels, leaving only Disney International HD — ceding control to Viacom18 to rule not only the English GEC sector but also the music and youth genre, with brands like Comedy Central, MTV and Vh1. (In fact, Viacom18 is one of only two Indian broadcasters today to have HD satellite music channels, the other being South India’s Sun network, as HD music channels from other networks have either shut down or were never launched in the first place.)

Conversely, Viacom18 has never had an English movie channel, a genre where Star Movies is an established brand — and will soon have its first rebrand in 15 years, according to a recent logo trademark filing — while in the lifestyle and infotainment/knowledge space both have a few channels. Here, Disney Star has National Geographic, Nat Geo Wild and Star Life (which has rebranded from Fox Life) and while Viacom18 itself has nothing here, its parent company Network18 operates History TV18 — formerly also the lifestyle channel FYI TV18 (2016–2020) — as a joint venture. Only in the kids’ sector do both broadcasters have an equally pronounced offering, Star with the Disney Channel and Hungama brands and Viacom18 with the Nickelodeon or Nick brand.

Below we have a table listing all the combined channels of Star and Viacom18 under each genre and language, much like was done with the now-scrapped Zee–Sony entity. This gives a humongous total of 119 channels — 77 of which are from Star alone (the same number as Zee and Sony put together) — though some will almost certainly be closed or sold as a result of the overlaps and hence anti-competitiveness, as described above. For the sake of fairness and completeness, even though History TV18 is not a part of Viacom18 — and hence this deal with Disney Star — it has been included so as to give an effective comparison of channels. Note that HD and SD feeds of the same channel are counted separately.

On the next two pages, we go over the consequences of how such a humongous broadcaster, with over 100 channels — one that is utterly dominant compared to Zee, Sony, Sun and others — will prevail in each genre of the Indian broadcasting sector. However, do bear in mind that some channels will invariably be closed or sold because there is too much overlap in many areas, especially after the Competition Commission of India (CCI)’s scrutiny of the merger.