MIB grants two, cancels five TV channel licences in Oct

The ministry of information and broadcasting (MIB) has approved two and cancelled five TV channel licences in October. The ministry has also given its nod to Viacom18 to launch Gujarati movie channel Colors Gujarati Cinema.

The ministry has granted non-news uplinking licences to Shopping Zone India TV and Nexgen Telelinks under the names Nireekshana TV and Khalsa Channel.

Further, the ministry has cancelled the licences of Jain TV (Jain Studios), RVS Channel (RVS Network India), Dheeran TV (Saanvi Studioz), Samaya (Satish Sugars), and PBN (Jainson Media).

Three of the five cancelled licences are in the news category while two are under the non-news category.

The ministry has also approved Viacom18’s name change application to rename the licence My Cam as Colors Gujarati Cinema. The broadcaster has already started testing the new channel.

Viacom18’s Colors Gujarati is the only Gujarati GEC in the country. Earlier, the broadcaster had launched Colors Kannada Cinema to fortify its presence in the Karnataka market.

Apart from Viacom18, the ministry has also approved Star India’s name change application to rename Star Utsav Movies as Star Gold Family. Star Utsav Movies is a free to air (FTA) Hindi movie channel.

Star India’s uplinking only licence has been renamed as Star Bharat (Middle East) from Life OK (Middle East).

Total Telefilms’ name change application has also been approved. The company has renamed its news licence as 1st News.

The MIB has so far granted permission to 1118 channels of which 252 permissions have been cancelled. Thus, the total number of permitted satellite TV channels having valid permission in India stands at 866 including 383 news licences and 483 non-news licences.