Samaya Live
Samaya Live, at samayalive.in, is a Bhubaneswar-based Odia digital news and infotainment platform operated by Ashirbad Prakashan Private Limited, the publishing house of the Odia daily newspaper The Samaya. It describes itself as Odisha's digital infotainment channel, with the slogan Odisha's Voice, India's Vision, and claims the position of the state's first private digital TV network. Edited by Papu Mohanty and run from the Samaya group's premises at Plot No. 44/54, Sector-A, Zone-D, Mancheswar Industrial Estate, Rasulgarh, Bhubaneswar, Samaya Live publishes Odia news videos daily through its website and a large YouTube presence, combining breaking news, regional reporting and entertainment with the institutional weight of a newspaper group founded in 1996. It is the video-first, social-first face of one of Odisha's recognised print brands.
A unit of Ashirbad Prakashan, house of The Samaya
Samaya Live is a unit of Ashirbad Prakashan Pvt Ltd, and that parentage is the key to understanding it. Ashirbad Prakashan publishes The Samaya, an Odia daily newspaper first published on 2 October 1996 from Bhubaneswar, founded by Basanta Kumar Biswal, a former Odisha minister, and long associated with his son Ranjib Biswal as managing editor and publisher. The Samaya was noted as Odisha's first Odia colour daily newspaper, and by the mid-2000s it reported an ABC-certified circulation of 1,37,184 copies. The group publishes from Bhubaneswar and Sambalpur, with editions serving regions including Angul and Dhenkanal, Balasore and Bhadrak, and Berhampur, and its Mancheswar Industrial Estate plant has also handled major printing work, including the Bhubaneswar edition of a national English daily. Samaya Live extends that print house into digital video. A note of care for readers: Samaya Live belongs to The Samaya group and is a different outlet from the similarly named, older Cuttack daily The Samaja and its samajalive portal.
Editor, address and the Bhubaneswar newsroom
Samaya Live names its editor as Papu Mohanty in its channel information, and gives its address as the Ashirbad Prakashan premises at Plot No. 44/54, Sector-A, Zone-D, Mancheswar Industrial Estate, Post Rasulgarh, Bhubaneswar, Odisha — the same industrial estate complex from which The Samaya newspaper has long been published. Sharing a home with the newspaper matters operationally. A digital channel inside a newspaper house can draw on the parent group's reporting networks, district correspondents, printing-era advertiser relationships and brand recognition, while bringing to the group the speed and formats print cannot offer. Bhubaneswar, the state capital, is the natural base: the assembly, the secretariat, the courts, universities and Odisha's political and cultural institutions are all within the city, and the state's news agenda is set there daily.
Odisha's Voice, India's Vision: positioning and claims
Samaya Live markets itself with two linked claims: that it is Odisha's number one digital infotainment channel, and that it is the first private digital TV network in the state, a pioneer in digital journalism carrying a responsibility to set high standards in credible and responsible news delivery. Those superlatives are the channel's own positioning and should be read as such, but the ambition behind them is clear. The slogan Odisha's Voice, India's Vision frames the editorial blend: regional connection first — news and updates that matter to Odisha — expressed for a national, platform-era audience. Its invitation to subscribers lists the values it asks to be judged by: authenticity through verified information from trusted sources, entertainment with purpose, balanced opinion and in-depth research, quality storytelling, and fresh videos every day. Its closing promise to viewers is truth, trend and transformation from Odisha.
What Samaya Live publishes
The channel's output is Odia video journalism and infotainment. Its catalogue ranges across hard news — administrative action such as encroachment eviction drives, court-related reporting including a story on liquor shop owners and Supreme Court rules, and observances such as National Panchayat Raj Day — to village and human-interest stories, such as a village's pride that its wood would be used in the Rath Yatra chariots, and intimate, entertainment-led personal stories presented in short Odia video formats. That breadth is what the word infotainment in its description signals: a feed in which a district administration drive, a festival story and a relationship feature are all Samaya Live items, edited for YouTube and social viewing. Rath Yatra material is a telling inclusion; no Odia news service is complete without the Puri Jagannath tradition, and Samaya Live's attention to the timber and the villages behind the chariots reflects a cultural beat rooted in the state.
Websites, e-paper and the Samaya digital family
Samaya Live sits inside a small family of Samaya web properties. Its own site is samayalive.in; its channel information also points viewers to odishasamaya.com, the Samaya web portal, and to samayaepaper.com, the group's e-paper, where the printed daily can be read online. The structure is typical of a newspaper group adapting in layers: the e-paper preserves the print product exactly, the web portal carries text news under the Samaya name, and Samaya Live leads on video, social distribution and younger audiences. For an advertiser or a reader, the three together offer the group at every speed — the morning paper, the updating website and the continuously posting video channel — all anchored to the same Bhubaneswar newsroom and the same Odia brand.
YouTube, Facebook and Instagram: where the audience lives
Samaya Live's public face is its social channels. Its YouTube channel, at @SamayaLive, publishes daily Odia videos with full channel descriptions carrying the editor's name, the company address and links out to the websites, Instagram at samayaliveodia and Facebook at SamayaLiveOdia. That boilerplate, repeated under video after video, is itself a publishing strategy: every clip is a signed, addressed piece of journalism that routes viewers back to the group's properties and invites them to subscribe, follow, engage and share. The channel asks viewers to become part of a digital family and to help grow Odisha's digital voice stronger every day — community language that reflects how Odia video news is actually consumed, through subscriptions, shares and comment threads rather than through a homepage habit.
The Samaya inheritance: print credibility in a video format
Samaya Live's distinct asset, against web-only Odia competitors, is inheritance. The Samaya newspaper has published since 1996 — nearly three decades in which it established itself, in its home market's description, as a recognised and influential platform reaching every corner of the state, covering politics, literature, culture, sports, cinema, health, education and agriculture with what its profiles describe as a clean, objective editorial approach. Its founding family is woven into Odisha public life; its weekly magazine sibling, Saptahik Samaya, founded in 1997 under the same Ashirbad Prakashan company, extended the brand into magazine publishing. Samaya Live inherits that name recognition and subject range, and translates them into the grammar of digital video: short, frequent, emotionally direct Odia stories, posted daily, measured in views and subscribers rather than copies.
Infotainment and the Odia video audience
The infotainment label deserves attention because it defines Samaya Live's editorial choices. Odisha's video audience, like India's generally, moves fluidly between news, devotion, cinema, comedy and personal storytelling in a single scroll. A channel that only carried secretariat news would lose that audience; a channel that only entertained would lose the Samaya name's news credibility. Samaya Live's answer is to hold both: verified news and regional connection as the stated foundation, entertainment with purpose and smart perspectives built on top, and a daily publishing rhythm so the feed never goes quiet. Its story selection — a Supreme Court rule and a village's Rath Yatra pride in the same week — shows that balance in practice, and its presentation of even a family story under the Latest Odia News banner shows how thoroughly the two modes have merged.
Place among Odisha's digital outlets
Odisha's digital market includes newspaper groups' portals, television channels' digital arms and web-only Odia start-ups. Samaya Live occupies the newspaper-group video niche: not the text portal of its own group — that role belongs to the Samaya web presence — and not a broadcast television channel, but a digital-first video network trading on a print brand older than most of its online rivals. Its claim to be the state's first private digital TV network, if read as a claim about early movement by a private Odisha media house into digital television formats, captures its strategy of arriving early to a format rather than defending print. For World News Media's directory purposes it is classified as an online news outlet: its journalism is published online, at samayalive.in and on its social channels, even where its forms borrow from television.
How to watch and follow Samaya Live
Viewers reach Samaya Live at samayalive.in, through the Samaya web portal at odishasamaya.com and the e-paper at samayaepaper.com, and most actively on YouTube at @SamayaLive, Facebook at SamayaLiveOdia and Instagram at samayaliveodia, where new Odia videos appear daily. Readers who want the parent newspaper's full text journalism will find it through the portal and e-paper; viewers who want Odisha in moving pictures — news, festivals, village stories and entertainment in Odia — will find Samaya Live the group's front door. Its channel pages openly publish its editor's name and its Bhubaneswar industrial estate address, maintaining the accountability conventions of its print parent in a social video setting.
Samaya Live in summary
Samaya Live is the Bhubaneswar-based Odia digital news and infotainment platform of Ashirbad Prakashan Pvt Ltd, publisher of The Samaya daily newspaper since 1996. Edited by Papu Mohanty and publishing daily Odia video through samayalive.in and its YouTube, Facebook and Instagram channels, it combines breaking and regional news with cultural and entertainment storytelling under the slogan Odisha's Voice, India's Vision. It presents itself as a pioneer of private digital television in Odisha, committed to verified information, regional connection and entertainment with purpose. As the video generation of a three-decade-old Odia newspaper house, Samaya Live shows how Odisha's established print brands are rebuilding themselves for the phone screen — same name, same city, new language of daily moving pictures.
