About ANTV

ANTV

ANTV is an Indonesian free-to-air television broadcaster based in South Jakarta. It broadcasts in Indonesian nationwide and is owned by Visi Media Asia, known as VIVA, part of the Bakrie Group. Stylised in lower case as antv, its name derives from Andalas Televisi, and before 2003 it was branded ANteve. Launched in 1993 as one of the first generation of private national networks, it is a general entertainment channel whose schedule has at different times emphasised music television, sport, Indian drama series, Indonesian sinetron and reality entertainment. Its sister channels are tvOne and VTV.

From a Lampung licence to a Jakarta network

The operating company, PT Cakrawala Andalas Televisi, was founded on 25 October 1990, and its founders were Aburizal Bakrie and Agung Laksono. ANTV began as a local television station for Lampung province, with a trial broadcast on 1 January 1993. In October 1992 the Department of Information had issued licences to six companies, and ANTV's was among them; of that group, only ANTV and Indosiar were able to broadcast continuously.

Within its first month the station was awarded a government licence for nationwide broadcasting and moved its studio to Jakarta. It began broadcasting from Jakarta on 28 February 1993, and its official broadcast date is 1 March 1993. Appropriately for a brand-new national network, the first programming it produced itself was live coverage of the general session of the People's Consultative Assembly on 1 March 1993. By the end of that year, on 29 December 1993, it had also begun broadcasting from Semarang. The network's headquarters today are in The Convergence Indonesia Building in the Rasuna Epicentrum area of Karet Kuningan, Setiabudi, South Jakarta.

The MTV and STAR TV years

ANTV's early affiliations gave it an international flavour unusual among Indonesian stations. It was affiliated with MTV Asia from 1993 to 1995 and then with MTV Indonesia from 1995 to 2002, which shaped a youthful, music-led part of its identity during the 1990s. The network was originally owned by the Bakrie Group together with Hasmuda Internusa Perdana.

A second international partnership followed. On 29 September 2005, STAR TV, then owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, bought a 20 percent stake in ANTV, the maximum foreign shareholding then permitted in a local media company, and the channel was affiliated with STAR TV from 2005 to 2009. The logo ANTV adopted in 2006 was based on the 2001 STAR TV channels logo; a revision of that design, used with a wordmark that dates from March 2003, remained in use from late 2016. The STAR connection ended at the close of the decade, leaving the Bakrie interests in full control through their media holding structures.

Ownership under Visi Media Asia

Since 2007 ANTV has been owned through Visi Media Asia, the Bakrie Group's listed media company known as VIVA, and since 2009 Intermedia Capital has been the listed holding company directly associated with the channel. Key figures named in the channel's records include Ardiansyah Bakrie as president commissioner and Ahmad Widarmana as president director. VIVA groups ANTV with the news channel tvOne and the children's and family channel VTV, sharing transmission infrastructure, sales operations and programme resources across the three services.

That stable ownership contrasts with the channel's frequently changing programme strategy. ANTV has repeatedly reinvented its prime time: as a music affiliate in the 1990s, as a sports carrier in the 2000s, and in the 2010s as a channel strongly associated with imported Indian serial drama and with Indonesian reality and comedy formats, before returning to a broader mix of local drama, reality shows and sport.

Sport: World Cups, leagues and a long gap

Sport was central to ANTV's first two decades. The network showed the 2014 FIFA World Cup, the Indonesian Super League and the Liga Indonesia Premier Division, and in earlier years it carried Formula One and Grand Prix motorcycle racing until the 2001 season. Few Indonesian channels can claim a motor racing heritage of that kind, and it belongs to the period when ANTV's schedule was more male-skewing and event-led.

Between 2015 and 2022 ANTV did not air sports programming at all, as drama and entertainment took over the schedule. Sport returned on 16 and 17 July 2022, when the network aired a friendly match between Persija Jakarta and RANS Nusantara FC, followed by Persebaya against PSIM. In September 2022 the One Pride MMA series, a locally owned mixed martial arts promotion, moved to ANTV from its sister channel tvOne. The network has also broadcast Germany's Bundesliga. The return of live sport reconnected ANTV with an audience it had served for most of its history.

Drama, reality and entertainment

General entertainment is the channel's present-day core. Its schedules have included Indonesian drama series, reality programmes and variety shows; VIVA's own corporate materials of the 2010s listed comedy and variety formats such as Pesbukers among the group's flagship ANTV programmes, alongside talk and reality strands. The channel also became widely associated in that decade with Indian television serials dubbed into Indonesian, which at their peak occupied large parts of its daytime and prime-time schedule and introduced Indian drama to a mass Indonesian free-to-air audience.

News and topical programming

News has played a supporting role rather than a leading one. ANTV has produced news and topical programmes under the Topik brand, including Topik Petang, and the programme has been studied by Indonesian communications researchers examining viewer satisfaction with its news coverage among audiences in Depok, West Java. Its sister channel tvOne carries the group's main news burden, which allows ANTV to remain entertainment-led and to schedule its own news in shorter, magazine-style forms rather than as rolling coverage. That division of labour within VIVA, news on tvOne, general entertainment on ANTV and children's and family programmes on VTV, is the organising principle of the group's three-channel portfolio, and it has held through several changes of programme fashion at ANTV itself.

Reach and the digital switch-off

At the time of the STAR TV investment, ANTV was described as having 24 relay stations covering 155 cities across Indonesia and reaching 130 million people. Its terrestrial footprint has since been rebuilt for digital broadcasting. Along with RCTI, MNCTV, GTV and iNews, ANTV completed the analogue switch-off on 3 November 2022, a day after most Jakarta broadcasters; its Jakarta analogue feed continued briefly with an on-screen notice before shutting down on 4 November, after the network had moved to DVB-T2 digital services.

Today ANTV broadcasts in 1080i high definition, downscaled to a 16:9 standard-definition feed. It is available on digital terrestrial television, and streamed live through its ANTVklik service as well as Vidio and other platforms listed in its availability records. The channel's official site in the WorldNM records is antvklik.com, reflecting how the brand's digital viewing offer is presented to audiences.

Identity and slogans

ANTV has refreshed its public slogans many times, a habit that mirrors its programme reinventions. Early slogans included Saat Paling Mengasyikkan and Wow, Makin Asyik Acaranya in the 1990s, followed by Wow Keren from 1998 to 2003 and again from 2011 to 2015, Makin Keren, TV Ramah Buat Keluarga, meaning friendly television for the family, in 2009-10, and antv Rame in its more recent presentation. The Indonesian word keren, meaning cool, recurs through the channel's branding history.

The channel's longevity also rests on its transmitter and multiplex inheritance: a network that began by covering Lampung and Jakarta in 1993 now reaches viewers through the VIVA group's digital infrastructure, on the same group multiplexes that carry tvOne and VTV, as well as through cable, satellite and streaming carriage arranged at group level.

More than thirty years after a trial broadcast in Lampung, ANTV endures as one of Indonesia's original private networks. Its history runs from a provincial licence through MTV and STAR TV partnerships to its place in the Bakrie Group's VIVA portfolio, and its schedule, now mixing local drama, reality entertainment and a returning sports offer, continues the pattern of reinvention that has kept the channel on air since 1993.