About JakTV

JakTV

JakTV, styled on air as Jak TV, is an Indonesian capital-region free-to-air television station broadcasting to the Jabodetabek metropolitan area from South Jakarta. It is owned by Mahaka Media, now trading as Mahaka X, the media group founded by Erick Thohir. Launched on 31 October 2004, with a first air date recorded as 16 March 2005 for its regular service, JakTV is a local station for the capital: its programming focuses on news, magazines and soft news about Jakarta and its surrounding cities, summed up in its slogan Dari Jakarta Untuk Indonesia, From Jakarta to Indonesia, adopted when it moved to twenty-four-hour broadcasting in August 2018.

Launch and early positioning

JakTV was prepared deliberately. Contemporary reporting in The Jakarta Post records that the station received its business licence at the end of 2002, spent a year researching its target market, began technical preparations in 2004, and began broadcasting in March 2005, at first from 12.30 in the afternoon to 1.00 in the morning, with plans to expand its hours. Its director at launch, Erick Thohir, presented it as a station unlike the existing Jakarta offer. JakTV aimed at educated viewers in the middle-to-upper economic brackets, described by the station as the AB-plus segment: people with strong purchasing power and cosmopolitan lifestyles, including expatriate residents, foreign entrepreneurs and visitors, whose needs the established local and national stations were said not to meet.

That positioning shaped the schedule. JakTV's brand management put its core audience at sixteen to forty years old. Entertainment and lifestyle programming, covering fashion, music and city life, were heavier in the mix than hard news, and the station said at launch that news accounted for only about ten to fifteen percent of its total programming, with locally produced programmes making up about thirty percent. Even its news was angled for its audience: rather than duplicating national news about events outside Jakarta, JakTV said it looked for capital stories its viewers would recognise as their own, such as white-collar crime, a child missing from a shopping mall or a burgled empty house. In a city served by every national network, JakTV's founding bet was that a distinctly metropolitan, upmarket local service could stand out precisely by being narrower and closer.

Ownership: Mahaka Media and Mahaka X

JakTV's owner, Mahaka Media, was founded by Erick Thohir as PT Abdi Bangsa on 28 November 1992 and built around the Republika newspaper, which the group bought in 2001. The company became a public company in 2002, changed its name to PT Mahaka Media Tbk in 2010, acquiring JakTV's operating company, PT Danapati Abinaya Investama, in that period, and rebranded as Mahaka X in June 2022 as it shifted its focus toward media technology. Alongside JakTV, the group's best-known brands include the Republika daily newspaper, the Gen FM and Jak FM radio stations in Jakarta, Golf Digest Indonesia and Republika Online. Erick Thohir stepped down from the company in 2019 on joining the government as Minister of State-Owned Enterprises.

For JakTV, group ownership has meant stability and cross-promotion rather than network control. The station is an independent broadcaster, not an affiliate carrying a national network's schedule. Its recorded former affiliation is with the City TV Network, from 2005 to 2014, a grouping of local city stations. Within Mahaka, JakTV is the television expression of a Jakarta-centred media portfolio whose radio stations, Gen FM and Jak FM, address a similarly young, urban, metropolitan audience in the same city.

Broadcast area and technical details

JakTV broadcasts from South Jakarta, with headquarters recorded in the Sudirman Central Business District area on Jalan Jenderal Sudirman. Its service area is Jabodetabek: Jakarta together with Bogor, Depok, Tangerang and Bekasi, the commuter cities that form the capital's metropolitan region. In the analogue era the station broadcast on 55 UHF. Its technical information records an effective radiated power of 390 kilowatts and a height above average terrain of 285 metres, under the licensing authority of the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology and the Indonesian Broadcasting Commission. In the digital era its service is listed on digital channel 34 UHF, shared with the tvOne Jakarta multiplex, with virtual channel 115.

Beyond terrestrial reception, JakTV has been carried on Indonesian pay and streaming platforms, with listings recording carriage on First Media, IndiHome, MNC Vision and TransVision. Like other Indonesian broadcasters, it passed through the national analogue switch-off, which reached Jakarta on 2 and 3 November 2022, when the capital's analogue services were shut down in stages. Since August 2018, before that transition, JakTV had already extended itself into a twenty-four-hour station, abandoning the limited broadcast day of its launch period and adding the From Jakarta to Indonesia slogan to mark its ambition to speak from the capital to the whole country.

Programming: news, magazines and soft news

Reference descriptions of JakTV agree on its editorial centre of gravity: news, magazine programmes and soft news for the capital region. An earlier media guide described its main news and current affairs magazine, Ada Apa Berita, meaning What's News, going out every evening, and noted the station's efforts to persuade local stations in other major Indonesian cities to broadcast some of its content, an early attempt to give a Jakarta local product a wider life without surrendering its local identity. The magazine and soft-news emphasis suits the audience the station chose at launch: viewers interested in how the capital lives, works, eats, shops, travels and spends its leisure, as much as in formal politics or crime.

News for the capital region

That does not make JakTV an entertainment-only station. Its news operation covers the Jabodetabek area as its home patch, the largest and most politically important metropolitan area in Indonesia, containing the national capital, the presidential and government district, the country's financial centre and a population spread across five administrative cities in Jakarta and the surrounding regencies and cities of West Java and Banten. A local newsroom in that territory covers everything from flooding, transport and city government to business, education and public services, and JakTV's magazine format allows those subjects to be treated at greater length and in a lighter register than a rolling news channel would use.

Sport on JakTV

The most internationally visible part of JakTV's history is its football coverage, remarkable for a local station. In 2016 JakTV broadcast Italian Serie A matches for two seasons, 2016-17 and 2017-18. In 2017 it covered Inter Milan's International Champions Cup matches in Singapore. In 2019 it broadcast selected live and most delayed English Premier League matches for three seasons, from 2019-20 to 2021-22, together with highlights. It also broadcast four live games, both semi-finals and both gold and bronze medal finals, of the 2019 FIBA Basketball World Cup in simulcast with the national public broadcaster TVRI.

Those rights deals changed how a Jakarta local station could be perceived. Premier League and Serie A football command large, young, urban audiences in Indonesia, exactly the audience JakTV had targeted since its launch research. By carrying top European football, a station licensed for the capital region placed itself, for ninety minutes at a time, in direct competition for attention with national entertainment networks, and it did so with the most valuable sports content in Indonesian television. The FIBA World Cup simulcast with TVRI added a different kind of prestige, a partnership with the public broadcaster on a global tournament.

Awards and recognition

Mahaka's corporate history records that in 2012 JakTV won a Mass Media Industry award as a local television station in the Tourism Masterpiece Award 2012. Industry recognition of that kind reflects the station's original proposition: a local station judged not only on news, but on its contribution to presenting its city, in this case the capital, as a place to visit, live in and do business. For a station whose launch interviews stressed cosmopolitan viewers, expatriate residents and visitors, a tourism-related media award was a fitting acknowledgement of the niche it had chosen.

JakTV in the Indonesian television system

JakTV illustrates a provision at the heart of modern Indonesian broadcasting. Under Broadcasting Act No. 32 of 2002, terrestrial licences are granted only to local stations, and national broadcasting is achieved through networking among them. Jakarta is therefore served simultaneously by the local services of national networks and by genuinely local stations such as JakTV, DAAI TV and Elshinta TV, each with its own licence, its own audience and its own idea of the city. Standard accounts of Indonesian media routinely cite JakTV, alongside Bali TV, as an example of the local television sector that grew up under that system, at a time when Indonesia had dozens of local stations in operation.

Within that sector, JakTV's distinction is its deliberate metropolitan upscale identity. It did not try to be a smaller version of a national general entertainment channel, and it did not define itself by a religion, a language community or a single province's culture. It defined itself by a city and a class of viewer: educated, economically active Jakartans and the wider Jabodetabek public, offered news, magazines, soft news and, for several seasons, the biggest European football leagues, twenty-four hours a day, from Jakarta to Indonesia.