About Bloomberg TV Indonesia

Bloomberg TV Indonesia

Bloomberg TV Indonesia was an Indonesian-language business and financial news television channel that operated in Jakarta from 2013 to 2015. It was produced in cooperation with Bloomberg Television, the global business network of Bloomberg L.P., under a licence held by the Indonesian company Idea Karya Indonesia, part of Jakarta's Idea Group. The channel holds a particular place in Indonesian media history: it was the country's first international business channel broadcasting fully in Indonesian, bringing the format, data culture and editorial standards of a global financial newsroom to a domestic audience in its own language. It officially launched on 11 July 2013, targeting Indonesia's growing middle class, entrepreneurs and investors, and it ceased operations at the end of August 2015 after financial difficulties overwhelmed a venture that had begun with considerable ambition and senior journalistic talent.

The partnership behind the channel

The channel was announced in December 2012, when Bloomberg Television formed a partnership with the Idea Group, a Jakarta-based media and strategic communication holding company, to launch a local-language business channel in Indonesia in early 2013. Presented in Bahasa Indonesia, the service was to combine Bloomberg's global news with locally produced content for Southeast Asia's largest economy. Andrew Lack, chief executive of the Bloomberg Media Group, explained the attraction at the time: Bloomberg had been watching Indonesia for several years, its economy had grown by 6.2 percent in 2012 — among the fastest rates in the Asia-Pacific region — and the company had maintained a bureau in the country for more than twenty years before launching a channel there. The Indonesian licence holder, Idea Karya Indonesia, held a five-year licence to operate the channel. Its major shareholders included two figures well known in Indonesian business and public life, Sandiaga Uno and Rosan Roeslani. The arrangement followed Bloomberg's established international model: a strong local partner holding the licence and building the newsroom, with the Bloomberg brand, format and global content supplied under licence.

Launch on 11 July 2013

Bloomberg TV Indonesia officially launched on 11 July 2013 on First Media, the pay television platform. The timing was deliberate. Indonesia in 2013 was frequently described as one of the world's most promising emerging markets: a population of more than 240 million, a rapidly expanding consumer class, and market research estimating around 50 million television viewers, of whom roughly three million subscribed to pay television. Bloomberg's global network at the time reached more than 310 million homes worldwide, and the Indonesian venture was designed to plug the country's business community into that system. The channel was designed to broadcast 24 hours a day, with about 80 percent of its programming centred on macroeconomics and the remainder on stock market news, adopting Bloomberg's global standards of accuracy, speed and data-driven reporting. From launch, the distribution strategy relied on pay television and digital platforms to reach an upper-middle-class audience accustomed to subscription services, alongside planned collaborations with local stations; the original partnership announcement had envisaged carriage across free-to-air partnerships, pay television, internet and mobile platforms.

Editorial mission and target audience

The channel's proposition was that Indonesian business deserved business journalism in Indonesian, at international standard. Plans for the channel in early 2013 were driven by Bloomberg's view that Indonesia was a rapidly growing economy with strong demand for business information. Rather than simply dubbing or subtitling the English-language global feed, the Jakarta operation was built to originate its own coverage of Indonesian markets, companies and economic policy, and to explain global developments through their Indonesian consequences. Its declared audience was the country's growing middle class together with entrepreneurs and investors — viewers who followed the rupiah, the Jakarta stock exchange, commodity prices and government economic policy as matters of direct personal and professional interest. That positioning distinguished it from Indonesia's existing news channels, which treated business as one segment within general news, and from the English-language Bloomberg service, which many domestic viewers found inaccessible. In language, in subject and in depth, the channel was designed to be a specialist in a market that had previously been served only by generalists and by foreign-language imports.

Programming and the newsroom

The newsroom was staffed by senior journalists, and in its first period the channel gained traction with original local programming. Among the shows most often cited was Start Up, one of the first Indonesian television programmes to highlight the local startup ecosystem, at a moment when Indonesia's technology startups were beginning to attract serious regional attention. The wider schedule followed the design set out at launch: macroeconomic coverage formed the bulk of the day, with market news around it, drawing on Bloomberg's global reporting, data and interview access while originating Indonesian stories from Jakarta. The channel's standing in its first year can be measured by an unusual episode: it was considered as a host for one of the debates of the 2014 Indonesian presidential election, but declined in order to preserve its editorial independence. For a channel barely a year old, being considered for a presidential debate indicated how quickly it had entered the national media conversation; declining indicated the seriousness with which it treated the Bloomberg principle of independence from the political contest it covered.

The Indonesian business context

The channel's fortunes were tied to the story it covered. It launched near the high point of international enthusiasm for the Indonesian economy, when growth above six percent, a commodity-driven export sector and a young consumer market made the country a fixture of emerging-market coverage. Business television depends on advertising and sponsorship from financial services, and on an audience of decision-makers attractive to those advertisers; in a market where pay television penetration was still only a few million households, that model was always going to be demanding. The channel's reliance on pay television and digital distribution gave it a concentrated, affluent audience, but a small absolute one by Indonesian standards, in a country where free-to-air television dominated viewing. Its planned collaborations with local stations were intended to widen that reach. The tension between a premium niche product and the economics of Indonesian television runs through the channel's short history, and helps explain both the quality of its journalism and the fragility of its business.

Decline in 2014 and 2015

By late 2014, internal problems had surfaced. Senior staff departed, and local production shrank to about 20 percent of the schedule, with the channel increasingly relying on repackaged content from Bloomberg International rather than on programmes made in Jakarta. That shift cut at the heart of the original proposition, which had been Indonesian-language, Indonesia-focused business coverage; a schedule dominated by repackaged international material was harder to distinguish from the global Bloomberg feed that subscribers could already receive. During this period the Bosowa Group was reported to be considering an acquisition of the channel, a sign both of the asset's residual value and of its owners' difficulties. No rescue stabilised the operation. Financial difficulties persisted, and Bloomberg TV Indonesia ceased operations on 31 August 2015, a little over two years after its launch and well inside the five-year term of the licence under which it had been created. The batch record of the channel gives August 2015 as the month operations ceased, consistent with the end-of-August date reported in reference accounts of the channel.

Closure and its meaning

The closure ended Bloomberg's attempt at a full Indonesian-language channel, and Bloomberg Television Indonesia took its place in the list of Bloomberg's former localised channels around the world, alongside other discontinued national versions. The experiment had lasted just over two years, yet it had demonstrated both the demand for serious business journalism in Indonesian and the difficulty of sustaining it on a pay-television revenue base in the Indonesian market of the time. The channel's experience — rapid establishment of credibility, an invitation to host a presidential debate declined on principle, then a hollowing out of local production as finances tightened — is a compact case study in the economics of niche news television in emerging markets. Its closure did not reflect a failure of the underlying idea: Indonesian business coverage in Indonesian continued to grow on other platforms and channels. It reflected, instead, the cost structure of a licensed international brand, a full local newsroom and a distribution base that was still small.

Legacy

Bloomberg TV Indonesia is remembered first for a genuine first: the first international business channel to broadcast fully in Indonesian. It showed that a global news organisation's standards of accuracy, speed and data-driven reporting could be operated by an Indonesian newsroom for an Indonesian audience, and it gave early television attention to communities — founders, investors and the emerging startup scene — that later became central to Indonesian economic life. Programmes such as Start Up anticipated the prominence that technology entrepreneurship would achieve in Indonesian media within a few years. The channel also forms part of the biography of Indonesian business media in the 2010s: a period when the country's economic rise attracted global media brands to Jakarta, and when the limits of the domestic pay-television market were tested by ambitious ventures. Though it broadcast for only a short time, it remains the reference point for discussions of dedicated business television in Indonesia, and the standard against which later Indonesian-language business services have been measured.