Maurya TV
Overview
Maurya TV was a Hindi and Bhojpuri regional television channel for Bihar and Jharkhand, headquartered in Patna. It was launched in early 2010 by filmmaker Prakash Jha's P&M Group and quickly became, for a period, the most viewed channel in its region. Maurya TV ceased to exist under its own name on 16 January 2014, when its new owner, Zee Media Corporation Limited, relaunched it as Zee Purvaiya. This profile is therefore written in the past tense: the story of Maurya TV is the story of a successful independent regional channel that was absorbed into a national news network.
The channel described itself as an infotainment service, mixing news and current affairs with general entertainment. Contemporary reporting put its content ratio at roughly 75 per cent news to 25 per cent entertainment, with both parts contributing similar levels of ratings, an unusually balanced mix for a regional channel of its time.
Origins: Prakash Jha's Television Venture
Maurya TV was promoted by the P&M Group, promoted in turn by Prakash Jha, the director of Bihar-set political films such as "Gangaajal" and "Apaharan", together with Manmohan Shetty, the founder of Adlabs, as an investor. The clearance for the channel had been secured from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting about a year before its public launch was announced in 2009. Rajiv Mishra, who had been senior vice-president at CineMaya Media Group and was associated with launching Times Now in the United States, was appointed chief executive of the P&M Group.
Jha presented the channel as Bihar's own voice. He said the state badly needed a channel of its own, that the content should be put together in Bihar and voice the concerns of the state, and that Maurya would be an independent, unbiased infotainment channel devoted to Bihar. He denied that it had been launched to counter the image being projected by chief minister Nitish Kumar's government, and he did not involve himself in day-to-day running. The group also had wider ambitions at the time, including plans in cinema exhibition and family entertainment, but Maurya TV was its flagship media venture.
Launch from Patna
Maurya TV commenced operations from Patna in early 2010; trade sources variously date its launch to January and February 2010. Jha called it a completely Bihari channel in a very local language, focused on the issues, talent and icons of Bihar and Jharkhand, and it was presented as the first satellite channel of Bihar. It operated from Patna with a staff strength of about 150 and tied up with news agencies for news content.
The top team included Mukesh Kumar as director, also looking after the editorial side, Vivek Sachar as marketing head, Sunil Agrawal as chief financial officer, Vijay Nath Mishra as general manager and Gunjan Sinha as creative director. Former Aaj Tak bureau chief Sujit Jha was roped in to look after the channel. At launch, its competitors in the region included ETV Bihar, Sahara Samay and Mahuaa TV.
Rise to Regional Leadership
Maurya TV grew consistently from launch and by the summer of 2011 it claimed the number one position in Bihar and Jharkhand by a wide margin. TAM data for weeks 29 to 31 of 2011, covering 10 to 30 July, was reported as showing its viewership at 2.7 times that of the number two regional channel in the two states. Prakash Jha's stated ambition of a channel of the people, for the people and by the people of Bihar and Jharkhand was presented by the channel as having become a reality.
Leadership of the channel in this growth phase rested with Manish Jha, who joined as business head in October 2010 and took over responsibility for the channel in November 2010, bringing experience from Star TV, Hathway, News24 and DEN Networks. The news department was led by Kumar Rajesh, an Aaj Tak prime-time journalist who had also been executive editor at India TV. From Patna, the channel expanded in June 2011 into Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, and it explored entering Nepal, where a test run was reported, and Bengal.
Programming and Language
Although licensed and described as a news and current affairs channel, Maurya's programming deliberately spanned infotainment. Its news operation covered Bihar and Jharkhand politics, public affairs and local events in Hindi with a strong local linguistic flavour, including Bhojpuri, while its entertainment slate included daily soaps, movies and other general entertainment. The channel said at launch that an entertainment segment, analytical episodes and information-based series would follow the news service, and its 75:25 news-to-entertainment ratio became its recognised formula, generating ratings in almost equal proportion from the two kinds of content.
Acquisition by Zee Media
In October 2013 Zee Media Corporation Limited, formerly Zee News Limited, informed the stock exchange that its board had approved the acquisition of up to 100 per cent of Maurya TV Private Limited. The sellers were Prakash Jha, Sangita Jha, Manmohan Shetty and Krishanlal Chabbra, and the price later reported for the company was Rs 7.79 crore, in what was characterised as possibly a distress sale. Zee Media already held 37.87 per cent of Maurya TV Private Limited and subsequently bought out the remaining stake to take complete ownership. Its recorded investment in Maurya TV included equity investment, a security deposit and a channel management fee, with further channel management and operational spending in the first half of FY15.
For Zee Media, the logic was geographic: Maurya gave it entry into Bihar and Jharkhand alongside its existing regional news channels for Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Punjab, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, plus the national Zee News and Zee Business.
Rebranding as Zee Purvaiya
On 16 January 2014 Zee Media relaunched Maurya TV as Zee Purvaiya for Bihar and Jharkhand. The relaunched channel followed the terrestrial entertainment network, or TEN, format Zee had used for Zee Marudhara, balancing news with infotainment: full bulletins in morning and evening prime time, a short news capsule every hour, and current affairs, fiction, non-fiction and factual programmes around them. Zee Media chief executive Alok Agrawal said the content would focus on Bihar and Jharkhand, capturing the culture, language and rituals of the two states and showcasing the differences between them.
The new branding used a bright yellowish-golden logo with the tagline "nayi soch nayi umang", aimed largely at a young audience. The channel was led by executive vice-president and business head Amitava Bhattacharya with a team of about 90 professionals, some retained from Maurya TV, including resident editor Shiv Pujan Jha, programming editor Indu Singh, marketing head Rakesh Tiwary and sales head Harsh Vardhan Dwivedi. In FY15 the channel was converted from the TEN format into a 24x7 news channel, and Zee Purvaiya was later rebranded again as Zee Bihar Jharkhand, available on more than 500 cable networks across the two states and on digital networks including DEN, GTPL and Dish TV.
Legacy
Maurya TV lasted only about four years under its own name, but in that time it demonstrated both the appetite in Bihar and Jharkhand for a locally produced, locally voiced satellite channel and the difficulty independent regional channels faced in sustaining themselves. Its rise to regional leadership under a filmmaker-promoter, followed by a low-price acquisition by a national network and a complete rebrand, became a template for how India's large news groups filled geographic gaps in the 2010s: not by building channels from scratch, but by buying successful local ones. The service Maurya TV began continues, in direct line, as Zee's Bihar and Jharkhand news channel.
