About Kanal 4

Kanal 4

Kanal 4 is a Kurdish-language entertainment television channel based in Erbil, in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, launched in September 2009 and operated by Kanal 4 Television Network Ltd. It broadcasts across the Middle East and is known in English-language references under the joined spelling Kanal4. In a Kurdish media landscape dominated by the satellite channels of the two great political parties, by religious stations and, later, by 24-hour news networks, Kanal 4 occupied a different niche: entertainment. The one extended account of its programming that survives in English follows the career of the Kurdish singer and presenter Daniel Madland, who made his first national television appearance on Kanal 4 in 2009, on its show Evin Jin U Jyan, and was invited back for the Aramo Show, beginning a collaboration that carried Kurdish entertainment television to its greatest audience success of the period. Kanal 4's own website, kanal4.net, was already being archived by 2011.

Launch in September 2009

Kanal 4 began broadcasting in September 2009 from Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Region. The timing is significant. Kurdish satellite television was by then a decade old: Kurdistan TV, the Kurdistan Democratic Party's channel, had been broadcasting since 1999, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan's Kurdsat since 2000, while Zagros TV had joined them in 2007. A channel launched in 2009 was thus not a pioneer of Kurdish broadcasting but a new entrant into an established market, and it entered on the entertainment side, where the party channels themselves had found their audiences but where a dedicated, non-news service could still make its mark. Its corporate form, a television network limited company headquartered in Erbil, marks it as a commercial venture of the modern Kurdish media economy that grew up around the Region's booming capital in the years of oil-fuelled expansion before 2014.

Erbil and the Kurdistan Region media scene

Erbil in 2009 was becoming the media capital of Kurdistan. Surveys of the Region's media describe a broadcasting world of three 24-hour satellite stations at the time of the first surveys, Kurdistan TV and Zagros TV owned by the Kurdistan Democratic Party and Kurdsat by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, alongside dozens of terrestrial stations, most of them run by political parties and broadcasting entertainment in the evenings, and a population in which most households had satellite receivers. It was into this party-structured landscape that independent and commercial entertainment ventures such as Kanal 4 inserted themselves, competing not for political loyalty but for viewing time, with music, shows and series. Erbil's role only grew with the following decade's launches, which made the city home to Rudaw, Kurdistan 24 and a cluster of production companies; Kanal 4 belongs to the earlier moment when the capital's commercial television was first taking shape.

Entertainment rather than news

The reference descriptions of Kanal 4 are unanimous about its character. It is an entertainment television channel, targeting Kurdish people living in northern Iraq and the surrounding areas, broadcasting in Kurdish across the Middle East. That positioning distinguished it from almost every famous Kurdish channel. The party satellites mixed entertainment with the news of their movements; the channels that later defined Kurdish television internationally, Rudaw from 2013 and Kurdistan 24 from 2015, were news operations. Kanal 4's wager, made in 2009, was that a Kurdish audience saturated with politics would give its evenings to music and entertainment presented in its own language, and the documented history of its best-known show suggests the wager was sound.

Evin Jin U Jyan and the Aramo Show

The programme history preserved for Kanal 4 centres on Evin Jin U Jyan, a Kurdish entertainment show whose title evokes love, women and life, and on the Aramo Show, hosted within the circle of the performer Aramo. In 2009 the singer Daniel Madland made his first national television appearance on Evin Jin U Jyan on Kanal 4. Madland, born in Sangasar in Sulaymaniyah Governorate in 1977, had moved with his family to Norway in 1998 as a refugee, returned to Erbil with the Iraq War and become a star in the Kurdish community with his 2003 release Ba Beto. His appearance on Kanal 4's show was popular enough that the channel invited him back, this time on the Aramo Show, and he established a close working relationship with the two Kurdish stars at the centre of those programmes, Evin and Aramo.

The sequel shows how much creative energy passed through Kanal 4 at that moment. Madland and his collaborators began working on productions for the channel Kurdmax, and by 2011 they had moved Evin Jin U Jyan itself to the new channel, where for two years Madland was part of the production and directing team that generated what audience measurement by IPSOS rated the number one entertainment show in the Kurdistan Region. A show born on Kanal 4 thus became, after its move, the Region's top-rated entertainment programme, a trajectory that casts Kanal 4 in the role of incubator: the small entertainment channel where a format and its stars first found their national audience.

From Kanal 4 to Kurdmax and NET TV

The story continues beyond Kanal 4 and illuminates the channel's place in the ecosystem. In 2013 Madland, Evin and Aramo decided to start a channel of their own, NET TV, launched from a makeshift studio in the Oscar Hotel in Erbil and described as the first Kurdish economics channel, before the collapse of the Kurdistan Region's economy after the Islamic State's seizure of Mosul in June 2014 pushed it toward entertainment alone. Madland hosted his own Friday-night show there from early 2014, inviting singers from Turkey and the Kurdistan Region to perform, and in 2016 the channel moved into Babylon Media's headquarters in Erbil, with Madland producing and directing across its output as it became a leading channel among Kurds worldwide. The personnel and the programme formats that powered that later success had been assembled, and first broadcast to a national audience, on Kanal 4 in 2009 and 2010. Television history is often written through its biggest channels; Kanal 4's claim on it is as the place where a generation of Kurdish entertainment talent first came together on screen.

Kurdish-language broadcasting and its audience

Kanal 4 broadcast in Kurdish to a broadcast area defined as the Middle East, and reference works describe its target as Kurdish people in northern Iraq and surrounding areas. Surrounding areas is not a small qualification: the Kurdish audience is divided among Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria and extended by a large European diaspora, and satellite television was the first medium that could address that whole audience at once, in its own language, from a Kurdish capital. Entertainment programming travelled especially well across those borders, since a song or a comedy show needed no shared politics to be understood in Diyarbakir, Mahabad or Erbil. Kurdish channels faced persistent constraints, limited funding, equipment and training, and the pressure of censorship and self-censorship described in surveys of Kurdish media, but satellite entertainment built and held the common Kurdish cultural space in which those audiences recognised themselves.

The satellite era in Kurdistan

Kanal 4 was a product of Kurdistan's satellite saturation. After 2003, and in the Region from the 1990s, satellite dishes spread until most households received their television from orbit, and the party channels adopted entertainment-based formats to hold their viewers. Dozens of terrestrial stations, broadcasting mainly in the evening, most of them party-run and entertainment-based, competed below the satellite tier. A dedicated entertainment satellite channel was the logical next step in that market's development: the format that had proved itself as the filler of party schedules became, with Kanal 4, the whole schedule. Its launch in 2009 sits between the pioneering party satellites of 1999 to 2007 and the professionalised news and media groups of the 2010s, marking the moment Kurdish television began to segment into genres as larger markets do.

Kanal 4 in retrospect

Kanal 4's documentary footprint is slender, one reference entry, an archived website, a line in the surveys of Iraqi media and the reflected light of Daniel Madland's biography, but what it documents is real and distinctive: an Erbil-based, Kurdish-language entertainment channel, launched in September 2009, which gave a returning diaspora singer his first national television appearance, built the Evin Jin U Jyan and Aramo Show circle whose format went on to be rated the Kurdistan Region's number one entertainment show, and held an entertainment niche among the party and news channels of Kurdish satellite television. In a media history usually told through news and politics, Kanal 4 stands for the other half of what Kurdish audiences watched, the music, shows and stars of their evenings, at the moment commercial entertainment television in the Kurdistan Region was coming of age.