Television in India

The television industry in India is very diverse and produces thousands of programs in many of the Indian languages. More than half of all Indian households own a television. As of 2016, the country had over 857 channels of which 184 were pay channels. National channels operate in Hindi and English, in addition to channels in several other languages including Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Assamese, Gujarati, Urdu, Bhojpuri, Kashmiri, Konkani and Haryanvi, among others. The Hindi, Telugu and Tamil language television industries are by far the largest television industries in India. The national television broadcaster is Doordarshan, owned by Prasar Bharati. There are several commercial television broadcasters such as Disney Star, Zee Entertainment Enterprises, Culver Max Entertainment (Sony Pictures Networks) and Viacom18 (owned by Reliance Industries through Network18 Group) at the national level, and Sun TV Network and ETV Network at the regional level. Currently the major Hindi national general entertainment channels (GECs) that dominate pay television are StarPlus, Sony Entertainment Television, Zee TV, Colors TV and Sony SAB. Since 2019, free-to-air Hindi channels like Dangal and Goldmines have drastically increased in popularity due to their availability on DD Free Dish. Regional-language channels like Sun TV and Star Vijay (Tamil), Star Maa and Zee Telugu (Telugu), Asianet (Malayalam) and Star Pravah (Marathi) are also among the most popular television channels by viewership. Unlike most other countries, major Indian entertainment channels do not air news, with some exceptions in South India like Sun TV and ETV. This is partly due to Indian media regulations prohibiting Foreign Direct Investment of more than 26% in print and broadcast news, and foreign-owned broadcasters like Star have exited news broadcast.