About Bandung TV

Bandung TV

Bandung TV is a local private television station based in Bandung, the capital of West Java, Indonesia, operated by PT Bandung Media Televisi Indonesia as an affiliate of PT Bali TV Narada within the Bali Post media family. It began broadcasting on 3 January 2005 and is recognised in Indonesian studies of the station as the first local television station in Bandung and in West Java. Bandung TV was created as a vessel for the creativity of the Sundanese people: from its first day on air it weighted its programming toward the enlightenment of society in every aspect of life, founded on arts and culture, and it carries that Sundanese identity in its slogan, Jati Diri Pasundan — the Identity of Pasundan, the Sundanese homeland. It is a station of the Indonesia Network family grouped around Bali TV, applying to West Java the same culture-first local television formula that Bali TV had pioneered in Bali three years earlier.

Origins: the Bali Post model comes to Bandung

Bandung TV's company history, as recorded in Indonesian university studies of the station, begins with the success of Bali TV. After the Bali Post Group's success with its Balinese station, the group expanded by founding another station, and the choice fell on Bandung, judged a strategic place for a local television station. The reasoning was cultural before it was commercial. Bandung is the historic centre of Sundanese civilisation, the land of Sunda whose culture, the station's histories emphasise, has developed since the middle of the fifth century, and whose traditions form a component of Indonesian national identity. In the middle of the technology revolution then sweeping society, Bandung TV presented itself as the embodiment of the arts-and-culture creativity of the Sundanese people in finding their identity through the medium of television.

The Sundanese framing was also a national one. The station's founding documents, as quoted in the studies, express the hope that revitalising the regional identity of West Java would tighten the unity of the Republic of Indonesia within its principle of Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, unity in diversity. Bandung TV was thus conceived in the characteristic language of Indonesia's first local-television generation: decentralised in form, local in language and culture, and explicitly nationalist in ultimate purpose.

First broadcasts and coverage

Bandung TV began broadcasting on 3 January 2005 for ten hours a day, from 14:00 to 24:00 Western Indonesian Time. It transmitted on channel 38 UHF at 607.205 MHz with a power of 5 kW, reaching the greater Bandung area — Bandung Raya — together with Cimahi, Padalarang, Cianjur and Cileunyi. Its transmitter was located in the Cisarua area of Lembang, in the hills north of the city from which the Bandung basin can be served. Some accounts of the station's technical launch give its early schedule from 06:00 to 24:00; the company histories agree on the start date, channel and coverage that defined its first service. Its editorial and marketing offices were located at Jalan Pacuan Kuda No. 63 in Bandung.

The broadcast day lengthened as the station established itself. In 2006 Bandung TV broadcast for twelve hours, from 12:00 to 24:00, and from the beginning of 2008 it broadcast sixteen hours a day, from 08:00 to 24:00. That expansion from an afternoon-and-evening service to a full sixteen-hour day within three years marks the station's transition from launch experiment to settled fixture of the Bandung media market.

Programming and in-house production

Bandung TV's programming strategy, documented from its early years, was breadth across the whole audience combined with depth in Sundanese culture. From the beginning it sought viewers of all groups — men and women, adults and children, old and young — with varied programmes projecting a friendly and energetic personality. At its first airing it presented twenty programmes; by the beginning of 2008 the number had risen to around thirty-five programmes, and almost ninety percent of them were in-house productions. That proportion matters. Many Indonesian local stations filled their expanded hours with relayed or bought-in material; Bandung TV's documented model was to produce its own schedule in Bandung, which is what made it a genuine production centre for Sundanese television rather than a transmission point.

The content of that production followed the founding brief: enlightenment in all aspects of life on a foundation of arts and culture. The studies of the station explain the choice of emphasis explicitly — arts and culture were selected as the station's centre because culture is the axis of life that moves the social and economic dimensions of society. News and information, education, entertainment and cultural performance were therefore not separate departments of the schedule but expressions of one idea: that a Sundanese station serves its public by strengthening the culture through which its public understands itself.

Reaching the Bandung Raya audience

From its first airing, Bandung TV set out to reach the whole of its audience rather than a single segment of it. The station's company histories record a deliberate demographic and psychographic breadth — men and women, adults and children, old and young — pursued through a varied programme mix and through an on-air personality described as friendly and energetic. That breadth was a practical necessity for the first local station of a large metropolitan region: Bandung Raya, together with Cimahi, Padalarang, Cianjur and Cileunyi, contains millions of viewers whose common identity is Sundanese but whose tastes span news, religion, education, entertainment and the arts. The station's answer was to make Sundanese culture the common denominator of a general schedule, so that viewers of every age and interest would encounter the Pasundan identity as the frame of the whole service rather than as a single cultural slot within it.

Symbols: the Wijaya Kusuma and the kujang

Few Indonesian local stations have a visual identity as deliberately constructed as Bandung TV's. Its logo is built around the Wijaya Kusuma flower, a symbol of the glory of the arts-and-culture tradition of West Java, combined with the kujang, the traditional Sundanese blade, and the Bandung wordmark. The station's own symbolism, as recorded in the university studies, reads the combination as a union of the Tri Tangtu di Buana — the threefold Sundanese ordering of the world, the Rama, the Resi and the Ratu — and as the essential unity of the elevated human qualities of silih asih, silih asah and silih asuh: loving one another, sharpening one another, and nurturing one another. The slogan Jati Diri Pasundan performs the same work in words, declaring the station's purpose to be the raising again of the cultural values and local potential of West Java in general and of Bandung, its provincial capital, in particular.

That symbolic density is worth dwelling on because it distinguishes Bandung TV from a merely municipal channel. The station presents itself as an institution of Sundanese civilisation — its flower, its blade, its philosophy of mutual care — using the most modern of media. Its identity work is continuous with the movement its parent group built in Bali under the name Ajeg Bali: in each province, the group's station takes the region's own cultural vocabulary as its brand.

Bandung and the Sundanese audience

Bandung, the station's home, is one of Indonesia's largest cities, a highland metropolis known for education, creativity, fashion, music and technology, and the cultural capital of the Sundanese, Indonesia's second-largest ethnic group. West Java is the country's most populous province, yet Sundanese-language and Sundanese-culture television has always been scarce within a national system centred on Jakarta, barely fifty kilometres of highway and a world of cultural difference away. Bandung TV's first-in-the-province status therefore carried real weight: it gave Sundanese viewers a station of their own in their own capital, at a moment when Indonesia's 2002 Broadcasting Act had newly made local licensing the legal basis of the television system.

The station does not have the Bandung market to itself — the city also hosts other local services, including the Islamic station MQTV, the Jawa Pos group's PJTV, and the West Java service of the public broadcaster TVRI — but Bandung TV's claim is different in kind from its competitors'. It is the Sundanese cultural station, the one whose founding purpose, logo, slogan and programme base are all organised around Pasundan identity, produced overwhelmingly in-house for the Bandung Raya audience it has served since January 2005.

Identity in practice

The philosophy encoded in Bandung TV's logo — silih asih, silih asah, silih asuh, to love, to sharpen and to nurture one another — is presented in the station's own materials as a working ethic, not merely a heraldic motto. It describes the relationship the station seeks with its viewers: a broadcaster that nurtures its community by preserving its culture, sharpens it through education and information, and binds it through affection for a shared homeland. Indonesian students and researchers have repeatedly taken Bandung TV as a case study on exactly those terms, examining its newsroom, its programme production and its role as the first local station of West Java, and their accounts preserve the fullest record of the station's founding philosophy. Read together, they show a station whose cultural mission was designed in unusual detail — in its name, its flower and blade, its slogan and its production model — before a single programme was made.

The Indonesia Network connection

Bandung TV is listed among the sister stations of Bali TV in the Indonesia Network, the Bali Post Media Group's family of local stations, alongside Aceh TV, Jogja TV, Semarang TV, Sriwijaya TV, Sumut TV and Surabaya TV. Its corporate affiliation runs through PT Bali TV Narada, and its founding followed Bali TV's by less than three years, making it one of the earliest proofs that the Bali formula could travel. The template the two stations share is visible in both histories: begin as the first local station of a culturally self-conscious province; programme the region's culture and language at the centre; produce in-house; and present local identity as a contribution to, not a retreat from, Indonesian nationhood. Bandung TV remains the West Java expression of that idea — the pride of Pasundan on channel 38, broadcasting from Bandung in Indonesian and in the Sundanese cultural register to the people of the Sundanese homeland.