About NET TV

NET TV

Overview

NET TV is a Kurdish television channel based in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. It was founded in 2013 by the singer and television host Daniel Madland together with the Kurdish television stars Evin and Aramo, and it began life billed as the first Kurdish economics channel, broadcasting from a makeshift studio in the Oscar Hotel in Erbil. Within a year, the collapse of the Kurdistan Region's economy following the Islamic State's seizure of Mosul in June 2014 forced a change of direction, and NET TV refocused on entertainment. In 2016 the channel moved its studios into the headquarters of Babylon Media in Ankawa, Erbil, and under Madland's production and direction it grew into one of the leading entertainment channels of the Kurdistan Region, watched by Kurdish audiences in the region and in the worldwide diaspora. NET TV is an Erbil Kurdish channel and is unrelated to broadcasters of similar name in Argentina or Indonesia.

The founders before NET TV

NET TV grew directly out of its founders' earlier work in Kurdish entertainment television. Daniel Madland was born on 5 October 1977 in Sangasar, in the Slemani Governorate of Iraq. In 1998 he moved with his family to Norway, seeking refugee status because of the prolonged conflict in Iraq. With the start of the Iraq War he returned to Erbil and quickly became a star within the Kurdish community with the release of his song "Ba Beto" in 2003; he moved back permanently in 2010 and settled in Erbil. His recorded singles from this period include "Ka Dlm Pet Da" (2005), "Kras Zarde" (2009), "Nazani" (2010) and "Garyar" (2013), released under Aramo Media, and his performing career made him a familiar face before he ever ran a channel.

Madland's television career began in 2009, when he made his first national television appearance on Kanal 4's show Evin Jin U Jyan. The appearance proved so popular that he was invited back onto the channel, this time on the Aramo Show. Through those programmes he established a close relationship with the two Kurdish stars Evin and Aramo. The three began working on productions for the television channel Kurdmax, and by 2011 they had moved the Evin Jin U Jyan show to that channel. For two years Madland was part of the production and directing team that generated what the audience research company IPSOS rated the number one entertainment show in the Kurdistan Region. That track record — a proven entertainment format, a recognised on-screen trio, and experience of moving a show between channels — was the foundation on which the three decided, in 2013, to stop working for other people's channels and start their own.

Founding in 2013: the first Kurdish economics channel

In 2013 Madland, together with Evin and Aramo, decided to start their own channel, which would focus on business and entertainment. NET TV was dubbed the first Kurdish economics channel, and it went on air from a makeshift studio in the Oscar Hotel in Erbil. The economics billing was distinctive in a Kurdistan television market dominated by party-owned channels carrying news, politics and general entertainment: no Kurdish channel had positioned itself around business and the economy, and the founders evidently judged that the Kurdistan Region's then-booming economy — Erbil in those years was a byword for construction growth and oil-fuelled optimism — could sustain a channel devoted to it.

The makeshift Oscar Hotel studio is part of the channel's founding story and a fair emblem of independent Kurdish television economics: unlike the region's major party channels, which drew on the budgets of the Kurdistan Democratic Party or the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, NET TV began as a presenters' venture, built by working television stars out of a hotel room studio in the regional capital. Its base in Erbil placed it in the larger and more conservative of the Kurdistan Region's two media hubs, Erbil and Sulaymaniyah, where most established broadcasters were headquartered and where the region's satellite uplinks and production companies were concentrated.

Early programming and the Madland shows

In its first phase NET TV combined its business remit with the entertainment instincts of its founders. In early 2014 Madland became the host of his own show on the channel, "Legal Daniel Gorani Ble," broadcast every Friday night, in which he invited singers from Turkey and the Iraqi Kurdistan Region to perform. The programme drew on Madland's own standing as a Kurdish pop singer and on the musical connections he had built across the Kurdish cultural space, which extends into south-eastern Turkey; a weekly music show hosted by the channel's founder gave the young station a recognisable Friday-night anchor alongside its economics content.

The founders' background in the Evin Jin U Jyan format, the entertainment show that IPSOS had rated first in the region during their Kurdmax years, shaped the channel's instincts from the start. Even while billed as an economics channel, NET TV was run by entertainers whose proven skill was in light programming and music television. That dual inheritance — a business-channel concept executed by an entertainment team — explains both the distinctiveness of the channel's launch and the speed of the reinvention that followed when the economic premise collapsed.

The 2014 turning point: from economics to entertainment

After the Islamic State's invasion and seizure of Mosul in June 2014, the economy of the Kurdistan Region collapsed. The war on the region's borders, the fiscal crisis between Erbil and Baghdad and the wider shock to business activity destroyed the conditions that had made a Kurdish economics channel plausible a year earlier; there was, quite simply, no booming economy left to cover and no advertising market of the same strength to fund coverage of it. Madland responded by changing the direction of the channel from economy to entertainment only.

The pivot is the central event of NET TV's history and an unusually direct example of a war redrawing a television schedule. A channel founded to chronicle the Kurdistan Region's prosperity became, within roughly a year, a pure entertainment service for a population living through conflict and austerity — circumstances in which demand for music, variety and escapist programming rises even as business journalism becomes unsustainable. The decision kept the channel alive where a rigid adherence to its founding format would likely have ended it, and it aligned NET TV with the entertainment-based format that most Kurdish satellite channels had already adopted.

The move to Babylon Media, 2016

In 2016 NET TV moved its studios to the headquarters of Babylon Media in Ankawa, Erbil. Babylon Media Group is an Iraqi multimedia company headquartered in Ankawa, founded in 1998 in the Netherlands by the Assyrian brothers Salwan and Nashwan Zaito, who originate from Zakho in northern Iraq and who relocated the company to Iraq in 2005 after the United States invasion. The group owns and operates networks including Babylon TV and Babylon FM and oversees a portfolio of channels among which Babylon Media's own listings include Net TV, alongside Gali Kurdistan, NRT News, Samara TV, Salahadin TV, UTV and Kurdsat TV. In November 2014 Babylon had signed a contract with the UAE-based satellite company Yahlive to include more channels on its network, and its Ankawa headquarters housed the largest green-screen studio in the Kurdistan Region, built in 2014, together with recording and live-broadcast facilities.

For NET TV, the move replaced the improvisation of the Oscar Hotel period with professional infrastructure: purpose-built studios, a satellite distribution partner and an established media group's production and advertising machinery. With the relocation, Madland produced and directed other shows across NET TV beyond his own Friday-night programme, and the channel's output broadened under his direction. Reference accounts credit that phase with leading NET TV to become a top channel in the Kurdish community, reaching Kurdish audiences throughout the world — a diaspora reach consistent with satellite distribution through the Yahlive platform and with the channel's entertainment format, which travels across borders more easily than local news.

Programming and audience

After 2014, NET TV's programming was entertainment: music performance, variety and the shows produced and directed by Madland within the Babylon Media facilities. The channel's flagship association remained with its founders — Madland as host and producer-director, Evin and Aramo as the stars alongside whom the channel was created. The Friday-night music format of "Legal Daniel Gorani Ble," inviting performers from Turkey and the Kurdistan Region, exemplifies the channel's cross-border Kurdish cultural orientation: its natural audience was never only the Kurdistan Region of Iraq but the wider Kurdish-speaking world, including the diaspora in Europe among whom Madland himself had lived during his years in Norway.

NET TV operates in a Kurdistan media landscape long dominated by party-owned outlets, in which, as regional media studies note, nearly all of Iraqi Kurdistan's media organisations have historically been partisan, funded directly or indirectly by political parties and exempt from profitability requirements. Against that background NET TV's model — a commercially conceived channel founded by presenters, first aimed at business viewers and then sustained as an entertainment service within a private media group — is a relative rarity, closer to an independent commercial venture than to the party-media pattern. Its listings under Babylon Media's overseen channels place it inside the region's largest private broadcasting group rather than inside a party structure.

Place in Kurdistan television

NET TV's documented history is compact but instructive. Founded in 2013 as the first Kurdish economics channel, improvised out of a hotel studio by three of the region's best-known entertainers, it was remade by the catastrophe of 2014 into an entertainment channel, professionalised by its 2016 move into Babylon Media's Ankawa headquarters, and carried from there to a leading position among Kurdish entertainment channels with a worldwide audience. Each stage of that story is attested in the channel's reference record, principally the documented career of its founder Daniel Madland and the corporate record of Babylon Media Group.

The surviving public record is thinner on other matters: no detailed programme archive, audience measurement series or corporate filing for NET TV has been published in the sources available, and the channel is documented largely through its founder's biography rather than through a corporate history of its own. What that record establishes is nevertheless a complete founding-to-maturity arc unusual among Kurdistan's smaller channels, and a clear identity: NET TV is the Erbil entertainment channel created by Daniel Madland, Evin and Aramo — not to be confused with the unrelated NET broadcasters of Argentina and Indonesia that share a similar name.