GEM TV
GEM TV is a Persian-language entertainment satellite television network, operated by the GEM Group — General Entertainment and Media — and broadcast free-to-air by satellite across Europe, including to viewers in the United Kingdom, as well as to the Middle East and beyond. Founded in 2006 by the Iranian businessman Saeed Karimian, GEM built its audience by doing something Iranian state television would not: professionally dubbing foreign entertainment into Persian and beaming it into Iran by satellite. Turkish romantic dramas became its signature, joined by Hollywood films, Bollywood hits, Western reality and talent shows and, in time, its own Persian-language productions. The group grew from a single channel into a network of some seventeen or eighteen Persian-language channels, with further services in Kurdish, Azeri and Arabic. Its success made it a target of the Iranian authorities, who condemned its programming, banned satellite dishes at home and sentenced Karimian in absentia to six years in prison. In April 2017 Karimian was assassinated in Istanbul. GEM TV survived its founder, and continues to broadcast.
Foundations: the GEM Group and Saeed Karimian
The GEM Group was established in London — the group dates its establishment to 2001, and GEM Television itself commenced work in 2006 — with the ambition of becoming a leading company in the Persian-language media industry. Its founder, chairman and owner was Saeed Karimian, an Iranian businessman who also held British citizenship. Born on 8 August 1972 in Qaen, Iran, Karimian built the business from outside the country he principally served. Soon after its founding the group's headquarters moved to the United Arab Emirates, with Dubai becoming its best-known base, and Istanbul in Turkey also figuring in its operations. From those cities outside Iranian jurisdiction, the group established a stable of channels and subsidiary companies aimed at Iranian viewers and at the wider Persian-speaking diaspora, the same audience that receives its free-to-air satellite signals in Britain and across Europe. The structure was deliberate: production, dubbing and management sat in London, Dubai and Istanbul, while the audience sat in Tehran and a hundred other cities where the group could not legally operate.
Programming: dubbed Turkish drama and Western formats
GEM TV's programming formula was simple to describe and difficult for rivals inside Iran to match. The network acquired foreign series and films and dubbed or subtitled them professionally into Persian. Turkish television dramas were the staple: series such as Magnificent Century, Kuzey Güney, Fatmagül'ün Suçu Ne? and Merhamet drew large audiences with their romantic and social themes, stories of family, wealth, love and betrayal that played strongly with Iranian viewers. Around them the group scheduled Hollywood films, Bollywood hits, documentaries and acquired entertainment formats, among them America's Got Talent and The X Factor, and Western reality programmes such as Keeping Up with the Kardashians. None of this material could be shown by broadcasters inside Iran under the Islamic Republic's strict regulation of popular culture, which was precisely the point: GEM offered Persian-speaking viewers, at home and in the diaspora, the international entertainment mainstream in their own language. More recently the network has also expanded into its own Persian-language productions, adding locally relevant original content to the acquired line-up.
Free-to-air satellite distribution, including the UK
GEM has always been a satellite business. The group's channels are broadcast free-to-air through satellite operators including Hotbird, Yahsat, Nilesat and Galaxy, in standard and high definition, and British viewers encounter GEM TV in the international section of the European satellite dial, receivable across the United Kingdom without subscription. The group says it was the first in its market to supply audiences with HD-quality programmes through free-to-air satellite channels, and it created GEM Online so that viewers could also follow its programmes over the internet. For the Persian-speaking diaspora in Britain — Iranian, Afghan and other Farsi-speaking communities — GEM forms part of a cluster of satellite services from outside the country of origin that sustain a shared popular culture across continents. The same footprint that reaches a dish in London reaches, far more consequentially, the millions of dishes inside Iran itself, which is where the group's audience and its political problems both principally lie.
Growth into a multi-channel network
From the single GEM TV channel of 2006, the group expanded into one of the largest Persian-language broadcasters in the world. By 2017 its website described seventeen Persian-language channels, with reports of the wider group commonly putting the figure at eighteen prominent channels, alongside four active subsidiary companies. The portfolio segmented the original formula: dedicated services for series, films, music, food, children and other genres, each following the same model of dubbed and subtitled international content mixed with Persian-language material. GEM Junior, for example, joined the family in early 2013, aimed at children and pre-teens; GEM Food, founded in 2014, built a schedule of dubbed international cooking programmes and competitions. In 2015 the group entered the Arab media market with the launch of the GEM Arabia channels for Arabic-speaking audiences, and by the time of its founder's death the network also operated one channel each in Kurdish, Azeri and Arabic alongside its Persian services. Growth on that scale, achieved entirely from exile, made GEM the defining commercial broadcaster for the Persian-speaking world outside Iran's state system.
Broadcasting into Iran and the authorities' response
GEM's relationship with the Iranian state was adversarial from the start. Operating from Dubai and Turkey, the network bypassed Iranian government restrictions through satellite broadcasting. Satellite dishes are officially banned in Iran, but they are widely used, allowing millions of Iranians to watch GEM TV despite the prohibition. The authorities repeatedly condemned the network's content as subversive, regarding its Western-style programming — its romances, reality shows and unveiled fashions — as part of a cultural soft war waged against the Islamic Republic's values. The fact that GEM carried entertainment rather than news made little difference: in a system where popular culture is strictly regulated to instil official values, a channel offering an alternative popular culture in Persian was itself a political act. The campaign against the group moved from rhetoric to law. A Revolutionary Court in Tehran tried Karimian in absentia and sentenced him to six years in prison on charges of acting against national security and spreading propaganda against the state.
The assassination of Saeed Karimian
On 29 April 2017 Karimian, aged 44, was shot dead in the Maslak neighbourhood of Istanbul, along with his Kuwaiti business partner. According to Turkish reporting, the two men were driving after 8pm when their car was stopped by a jeep and shots were fired; Karimian died at the scene, his partner died later in hospital, and the vehicle used in the attack was later found burnt out. Turkish police investigated, and in May 2017 Turkish media reported that two people accused of the assassination had been arrested in Serbia with fake passports while travelling towards Iran. Family members told the BBC that Karimian had been threatened during the previous three months and had been planning to leave Istanbul and move back to London. The exiled Iranian opposition group the National Council of Resistance claimed the killing had been carried out by the Revolutionary Guard on the orders of Iran's Supreme Leader; Turkish sources at the time also raised the possibility of business and gang disputes. Responsibility for the assassination has never been conclusively established in public, and speculation about Iranian government involvement remains unproven.
GEM TV after 2017
The network outlived its founder. GEM TV continued broadcasting after April 2017, its channel portfolio intact and its satellite distribution unchanged, and the group has continued to develop its services, including its genre channels and online presence, in the years since. The assassination, intended or not, had demonstrated the network's significance: entertainment broadcasters are not usually treated as matters of national security, tried in absentia or killed in foreign capitals. For its British and European audience, GEM remained what it had been since 2006 — a free-to-air fixture of the satellite dial, serving Persian-speaking households with the dramas and shows they could not get from domestic broadcasters in either their country of residence or their country of origin. The channels' schedules continued to be built around the dubbed Turkish serials that made the network famous, supplemented by films, talent formats and original Persian productions.
Controversies and challenges
Beyond its confrontation with Tehran, GEM has faced persistent commercial and legal difficulties. The group itself acknowledges significant piracy problems, with many of its programmes illegally streamed or redistributed, an occupational hazard for a free-to-air satellite broadcaster whose dubbed content is valuable and easily copied. Its operating model also depends on the tolerance of the jurisdictions it broadcasts from and into: uplinked from outside Iran and received on dishes that are technically illegal for much of its core audience, distributed in Europe as an unremarkable international channel while regarded by one government as an instrument of cultural subversion. That duality is the network's defining condition. The Iranian authorities' condemnation, the prison sentence imposed on its founder in his absence and the threats reported before his death all form part of the same record: a broadcaster whose offence, in the eyes of its home state, was to give its audience a choice.
Significance for Persian-speaking audiences
GEM TV's importance lies in the audience it assembled. For Persian speakers inside Iran, it provided professionally dubbed access to the Turkish, American, Indian and European entertainment that official broadcasting excluded, and in doing so it helped set the popular culture agenda for a generation of viewers who watched on illegal dishes. For the diaspora, including the Persian-speaking communities of London and other British cities who receive it free-to-air by satellite, it provides a continuing connection to that same shared culture, in Persian, alongside viewers in Tehran, Dubai and Los Angeles. Founded in London in the first years of the satellite era, grown into a network of some twenty channels, and continued after the violent death of its founder, GEM TV stands as the most successful example of exile broadcasting in the Persian language — a commercial entertainment empire built entirely outside the country whose audience it serves.
