A1TV
A1TV is an independent British Pakistani infotainment channel that launched on the Sky satellite platform in the United Kingdom, based in London, England. Described at launch as a channel built specifically for British Pakistanis, it combined regular news bulletins and discussion programmes from Pakistan with community news gathered in Britain and Europe, plus drama serials and Hindi and Pakistani films in peak time. In a crowded corner of the Sky electronic programme guide, where dozens of South Asian channels compete for diaspora audiences, A1TV set out to distinguish itself not simply by importing programmes from Pakistan, but by presenting itself as a British Asian news operation in its own right, with studios in the United Kingdom and a network of correspondents intended to cover the community where it actually lives.
Launch on Sky
A1TV was announced by the British Asian media press in March 2018 and launched on Friday 23 March on Sky channel 869, following a period of test transmissions that viewers with Sky receivers could tune in manually before the channel took its place on the electronic programme guide. Launch coverage reported that the service subsequently appeared on Sky channel 870. Free-to-air carriage on Sky mattered greatly to a channel of this kind: it placed A1TV in front of the large British South Asian audience that used Sky as its main route to Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi programming, without the barrier of a subscription to a premium Asian package. The channel is listed in the batch record for this directory with its official website at a1tv.in and with London as its base, reflecting the British operation behind the service. Its arrival was part of a long pattern in British Asian television in which new entrants used Sky's international section to reach viewers across the whole country at once, rather than building audiences city by city.
The Founder: Mubeen Rasheed
The channel was helmed by Mubeen Rasheed, who served as its chief executive and became its public face at launch. Rasheed's background was unusual among channel founders because it straddled print journalism, broadcasting and community institutions in Britain. Before A1TV, he had founded the first British Asian law conference and an international media conference, both in 2015. His academic record, as reported at the time of the launch, included five master's degrees in social sciences subjects — Urdu, history, Pakistan studies, mass communication and political science — alongside a law degree and a diploma in law. He had also written four books on current-affairs themes, including a travelogue about Great Britain. In British media, he was known as editor of NaiBaat London, a weekly newspaper circulated in the UK and Europe, and as bureau chief for Neo TV's UK and Europe operation. That combination of newspaper editing and television bureau experience shaped A1TV's pitch: it was presented less as an entertainment import and more as a newsroom-led channel run by a journalist who already knew the British Pakistani audience from print.
A News-Led Schedule
News sat at the centre of the A1TV schedule in a way that was clearly set out before launch. The channel broadcast 60-minute news bulletins every three hours, beginning at 06:00 and continuing at 09:00, 12:00, 15:00, 18:00, 21:00 and midnight. That rhythm gave the channel seven substantial bulletins a day, a structure more like a rolling news service than a general entertainment channel that drops in short headlines between programmes. Around those bulletins, A1TV scheduled news and discussion shows from Pakistan, connecting British viewers to the political and social conversation of the country many of them, or their parents, had come from. For a diaspora audience, that kind of schedule serves a practical purpose: viewers can turn to the channel at predictable points in the day and find a full hour of news rather than fragments, whether they are following elections, cricket, court cases or community stories.
Entertainment: Drama and Film
Although news led the proposition, A1TV described itself as an infotainment channel, and its evenings were given over to entertainment. Drama serials occupied peak-time slots at 20:00 and 22:00, the hours when family viewing is strongest in British Asian households. The channel aired entertainment content supplied by Play Entertainment, including the series Dil Jalda, Hansty Gaal and Baby Ki Kahani, named in its launch publicity. Alongside drama, the schedule included a line-up of Hindi and Pakistani films. This mixture was deliberate. Pakistani television drama has a loyal following among British Pakistani viewers, including viewers whose main language at home is English but who watch Urdu serials with family, while film slots give a channel broad, low-cost appeal across generations. By mixing fictions and films with news, A1TV followed the model of the established Pakistani channels in the UK while adding its own British news identity on top.
British and European Community News
The feature Rasheed emphasised most at launch was local coverage. A1TV promised local community news from across the UK and Europe, gathered through what he described as one of the biggest correspondent networks ever assembled for such a channel. The channel was set up with four studios at locations up and down the UK, a significant infrastructure claim for an independent start-up, and one intended to signal that British Pakistani stories — council decisions, business openings, religious and cultural events, achievements and problems in towns with large Pakistani communities — would be treated as news in their own right rather than as filler between bulletins from Pakistan. For the audience, that promise addressed a familiar gap: the big Pakistani networks covered Pakistan in depth and Britain only occasionally, while British mainstream news covered British Pakistani communities only occasionally too. A channel based in Britain, staffed by journalists from the community, aimed to sit in between.
Audience and Positioning
A1TV's target audience was the British Pakistani community in the first instance, with a wider British Asian audience for its Hindi film and entertainment content. That audience is one of the largest and longest-established in Britain, concentrated in London, the West Midlands, West Yorkshire, Greater Manchester and towns across the North and Midlands — the geography reflected in the channel's decision to spread its studios around the country rather than concentrate solely in the capital. Its positioning was independent: unlike Geo, ARY or the other Pakistani networks whose UK channels are offshoots of large media groups in Karachi and Lahore, A1TV was a British start-up built by a British-based journalist. Independence brought flexibility and a clear local identity, but it also meant competing for advertising and attention against networks with far larger programme libraries and marketing budgets, a challenge common to every independent entrant in the Sky international section.
Place in British Asian Television
A1TV belongs to a generation of channels that reshaped British Asian television from a handful of imported services into a diverse, competitive sector. By the time it launched in 2018, Sky's international section carried Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi and Punjabi news, entertainment, music and religious channels, many of them free-to-air. What most of them shared was a model based on content made in South Asia for South Asian audiences, distributed to the diaspora. Channels like A1TV represented the other strand of the sector: programming made, at least in part, in Britain, for viewers whose lives are British as well as Pakistani. Its schedule — heavy news bulletins, discussion from Pakistan, drama at peak time, films, and community reporting from British towns — can be read as an attempt to hold those two identities together in a single channel.
Programming Identity
The identity that emerges from A1TV's launch material is consistent: a serious, news-first channel with entertainment used to retain the audience between bulletins. The three-hourly hour-long bulletins, the discussion shows, the named drama titles from Play Entertainment and the film slots were all specified before launch, suggesting a schedule planned around fixed points rather than improvised. The emphasis on discussion programming is also notable, because talk and current-affairs formats are where diaspora channels most directly engage with politics in both countries — Westminster and Islamabad alike. A1TV's promise of unrivalled news coverage from Pakistan, delivered to British Pakistanis, placed it in direct conversation with established rivals such as Geo News and ARY News, while its British community coverage gave it a claim none of the imports could easily match.
Availability
In the United Kingdom, A1TV was available free-to-air on Sky, first announced for channel 869 at launch on 23 March 2018 and listed on channel 870 in launch-day coverage, within the international section of the Sky guide. Test transmissions before launch were carried on satellite parameters published for manual tuning, a common route by which Sky viewers first encounter new Asian channels. The channel's listing in Sky programme information in later years, where A1TV appears among the international channels, indicates that the name retained a presence on the platform beyond its launch period. Viewers could also follow the channel through its official web presence. As with other independent services in the sector, exact guide positions in the international section have tended to shift over time as Sky reorganises its electronic programme guide.
Legacy and Significance
Whether measured by longevity or by ambition, A1TV is a useful example of the independent end of British Asian broadcasting. It showed that by 2018 it was still possible for a single journalist-entrepreneur, drawing on a background in community newspapers and television bureaux, to put a national channel on Sky with multiple studios, a structured news schedule and named entertainment content. Its launch pitch — British Pakistani news made in Britain, discussion and drama from Pakistan, films for the whole family — summarised the viewing habits of its audience in one schedule. For researchers of diaspora media, and for viewers who remember the channel on Sky 869 and 870, A1TV stands as part of the story of how British Pakistanis built their own television institutions in the UK rather than relying entirely on channels beamed in from abroad.
