Republic TV,
the English-language television channel headed by journalist Arnab Goswami will go on air on several cable and DTH platforms in India starting Friday evening.
Official confirmation came from Dish TV, India’s oldest DTH platform, which confirmed that the channel will be made available starting from Saturday.
Subscribers of Dish TV will get the channel free of charge on slot 771 for a period of two months.
Tata Sky, the most popular DTH platform, is testing the channel and will start transmitting it for all users from late Friday onwards. It will be available on slot 616 on Tata Sky and 360 on Videocon D2h.
Airtel Digital will carry it on channel no 771.
Many cable networks, including Hathway, are also broadcasting Republic TV’s test signals.
Republic TV is ‘free to air’, meaning that cable and DTH operators do not have to pay ARG Outlier Media any money for carrying it.
However, at least some cable and DTH operators are not going to offer the channel free of charge to users, though it will be made part of some of their channel bouquets.
The channel is being positioned as ‘nationalistic and pro-military’, though it may not be as anti-establishment as Times Now was under Goswami.
In a recent interaction with Internet users on Reddit, the channel head also refused to position it as a ‘right wing’ channel.
Though comparisons are being made with Fox News of the US, the Indian television media is not as ‘Left Liberal’ as the US media scene was when Fox News launched twenty years ago.
At least some channels, like Times Now, Zee News, India TV and India Today can be described as right of center, even as others like NDTV are decidedly left of center.