About Sumut TV

Sumut TV

Sumut TV is an Indonesian local television station owned by Kelompok Media Bali Post, the Bali Post Media Group, through PT Sumut Media Televisi, and affiliated to the group's Indonesia Network of regional stations. Its name is simply the standard abbreviation of its province, Sumatera Utara, North Sumatra. The station was officially launched on 18 April 2016, a date it keeps as its birthday, after a four-year licensing process, and it received its permanent broadcasting permit in September 2017. It is based in Pematangsiantar, at Jalan Sangnawaluh in the Mega Land complex in Siantar Timur, and its terrestrial service covers Pematangsiantar city and Simalungun Regency, while a free-to-air satellite feed on Telkom-4 carries it across Indonesia. Broadcasting in Indonesian, Batak and English, it mixes a four-edition daily news service under the Seputar Sumut banner with information and cultural programming that gives particular space to the local wisdom, customs and culture of North Sumatra, under the motto "Matahari Sumatera Utara", the Sun of North Sumatra.

A four-year road to air: licensing, 2012 to 2015

Sumut TV's documented history is, unusually for a small local station, a matter of detailed public record, because the station itself has published its licensing chronology. In 2012 PT Sumut Media Televisi applied for a broadcasting permit as a private television broadcasting institution. The application passed administrative verification on 29 February 2012 and an Evaluation Hearing on 1 November 2012, after which the North Sumatra regional broadcasting commission, KPID Sumatera Utara, issued its recommendation of broadcasting feasibility, the document required to proceed to the joint forum stage of the licensing process. Three years later, on 5 October 2015, the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology issued the station's Principle Permit, the Izin Prinsip, which entitled it to conduct trial broadcasts; the principle permit was extended once, as the rules allow. The chronology shows the patience local television required in Indonesia's analogue-era licensing system, in which a station could spend years in verification, hearings and trial status before its first official night on air.

Launch on 18 April 2016 and the permanent permit

Sumut TV was officially launched locally on 18 April 2016, in a launch event broadcast from 18:00 Western Indonesian Time, and that evening is commemorated as the station's birthday. The licensing process continued after the launch, as it does for Indonesian stations, which broadcast first under trial arrangements. On 29 May 2017 the station applied for its Radio Station Permit, the Izin Stasiun Radio that authorises its transmitter frequency, and received it on 9 June 2017 under number 01944087-00SU/2020172022. On 17 July 2017 it submitted to the Trial Broadcast Evaluation, and on 23 August 2017 the North Sumatra broadcasting commission carried out a clarification of its programme aspects as part of that evaluation. On 8 September 2017 the process concluded with the grant of the permanent broadcasting permit, the IPP Tetap, valid from 8 September 2017 to 7 September 2027. A local station's first decade is framed by that permit window, and Sumut TV's published record of dates, numbers and stages is a small documentary history of how Indonesian local television was licensed in the years before the digital switchover simplified the system.

The Indonesia Network and the Bali Post group

Sumut TV belongs to one of Indonesia's distinctive local-television families. Its owner, Kelompok Media Bali Post, the Bali Post Media Group, entered television on 26 May 2002 with Bali TV, a station built around Balinese cultural content and local arts empowerment, and then developed a networking model in which local stations in other regions joined the family: the group's television stations include Bali TV, Bandung TV, Jogja TV, Semarang TV, Sriwijaya TV, Aceh TV, Surabaya TV and Sumut TV, linked under the Indonesia Network name. The model gives each station a local name, local staff and local programming, within a group that shares experience and identity across islands. Sumut TV is the network's North Sumatra member, and its call-sign meaning is recorded plainly in its own reference data: Sumut is Sumatera Utara, and the station is North Sumatra television. Its stated slogans have played on the same regional pride, from "Matahari Sumatera Utara" to "Surya Sumatera Utara", both invoking the sun of North Sumatra.

Coverage: Pematangsiantar, Simalungun and a national satellite feed

Terrestrially, Sumut TV broadcasts in digital on 29 UHF, at 538 megahertz, with virtual channel 804, from the TVRI Simarjarunjung multiplexing, covering the whole of Pematangsiantar city and Simalungun Regency. Pematangsiantar is North Sumatra's second city, set in the highlands on the road between Medan and Lake Toba, and Simalungun is the large regency around it, a region whose people are predominantly Batak Simalungun. The station's street address places it in East Siantar, and its picture format is 576i standard definition in 16:9. Beyond the terrestrial area, Sumut TV reaches the whole of Indonesia through the Telkom-4 satellite in DVB-S MPEG-2, at frequency 3932 megahertz, symbol rate 7150, horizontal polarisation, free to air, and through its YouTube channel. Earlier listings also recorded the station on the Palapa D satellite at 3814 horizontal, symbol rate 6363, the parameters the station publicised when it broadcast on channel 62 UHF with daily hours from 09:00 to 22:30. As with other Indonesia Network stations, satellite carriage means the Siantar signal is a national channel for the North Sumatran diaspora while remaining, in content, a local one.

News: Seputar Sumut in four editions and three languages

The station's news identity is Seputar Sumut, "Around North Sumatra", produced in four daily editions: Seputar Sumut Pagi in the morning, Seputar Sumut Siang at midday, Seputar Sumut Sore in the afternoon and Seputar Sumut Malam at night. The station's own programme information gives the flavour of the service, with the morning edition running in the first hour of the broadcast day and short Sekilas Sumut headline flashes dropped through the afternoon. Two features distinguish the service from most Indonesian local news. First, one edition of Seputar Sumut is presented in Batak Simalungun, the language of the station's home region, a recognition that for many viewers in Simalungun the regional language is the natural medium for local affairs. Second, the station produces Sumut News Service, a news service in English, giving its bulletins a reach toward the Lake Toba tourism audience and international viewers of its satellite and online feeds. A local station broadcasting news in Indonesian, a Batak language and English is using language itself as a statement about who its province is and who it wants to address.

Information and cultural programming

Sumut TV's information slate is long and locally rooted. Role Play Sumut, Baiknya Kelen Tau — its title in the colloquial Malay-Deli second person of the region, roughly "you lot had better know" — Traventure, the culinary strand Kemek Kemek, Warna Warni, the travel format Jalan-Jalan, I Got It, Sumut Pedia, Potret Sumut, The Generation, Kejar Prestasi, Spot 30, Bumi Hijau, Liputan Khusus, and Voice Of Sumut fill the schedule between bulletins, alongside national magazine material supplied by the Antara news agency's television service, including Mata Indonesia, Oase Indonesia and Indonesia Bergerak. Entertainment includes Margondang, built on the gondang music central to Batak ceremonial life, and Folk Music. The station describes its own editorial centre of gravity clearly: its programmes are weighted toward exploring local wisdom, giving generous visual space to the customs and culture of the region, so as to grow affection for and preservation of the local wisdom that forms the spirit and identity of North Sumatra. In a province of Batak, Malay, Karo, Nias and many other cultures, a television station that treats adat, customary practice, as prime-time material is performing cultural work that national television does not attempt.

North Sumatra context

Sumut TV operates in one of Indonesia's most populous and diverse provinces, whose capital, Medan, is among the country's largest cities, and whose regions range from the Lake Toba highlands to the Straits of Malacca coast. The province's television market is crowded at the Medan end by national network relays and by TVRI's long-established regional station, which is why the Bali Post group's choice of Pematangsiantar as the station's home matters: Sumut TV is not a Medan station competing for the capital's advertising, but a highland city station serving Pematangsiantar and Simalungun first, with the whole province as its editorial horizon and the whole country as its satellite footprint. Its virtual channel number, its multiplex place on the TVRI transmitter and its permanent permit to 2027 give it the settled technical and legal position of an established local broadcaster, and its sisterhood with Bali TV and the other Indonesia Network stations connects its small Siantar newsroom to a family of regional stations from Aceh to Bali, each making the same argument in its own province: that local life, in local languages, deserves its own television.

Sumut TV today

Sumut TV continues to broadcast from Pematangsiantar under PT Sumut Media Televisi, within Kelompok Media Bali Post and the Indonesia Network. Its daily pattern remains the one established since its 2016 launch: Seputar Sumut news through the day, in Indonesian, Batak Simalungun and English editions, surrounded by information, culinary, travel and cultural programmes and by Batak musical entertainment, distributed terrestrially on digital 29 UHF to Pematangsiantar and Simalungun and nationally by Telkom-4 satellite and online streaming. Approaching the end of its first permanent permit period in 2027, the station stands as a documented example of the full Indonesian local-television journey — application in 2012, launch in 2016, permanent permit in 2017, digital transmission thereafter — carried out not in the provincial capital but in North Sumatra's second city, in the service of the province whose abbreviated name it bears.