About News9

News9

News9 is an English-language news brand from India that began life as a television channel in Bengaluru, Karnataka, and later reinvented itself as a digital-first service. It is the English news outlet of the TV9 Network and is owned by Associated Broadcasting Company Private Limited, the company behind a family of news channels in several Indian languages. In its original television form, News9 covered Karnataka and, in particular, its capital city Bengaluru, offering English-speaking viewers in the south of India a channel built around their own city rather than around Delhi or Mumbai.

That local beginning is central to the story of News9. It was launched at a time when English television news in India was dominated by national channels based elsewhere, and its founders argued that southern India had been largely overlooked by that genre. News9 therefore started as a fast, city-focused, round-the-clock channel for a young Bengaluru audience. More than a decade later, the same name took on a second life. After the linear television channel was closed in 2020, TV9 Network rebuilt News9 as a national English service for digital platforms, streaming and on-demand viewing, with products including News9 Live, the News9Live.com publishing platform and the News9 Plus over-the-top service.

Overview and Identity

News9 is best understood in two phases. The first, from 2009 to 2020, was a conventional satellite and cable television channel broadcasting in English from Bengaluru. The second, from 2020 onwards, is a digital brand that uses the same name and heritage but reaches viewers through websites, social platforms, connected televisions and a subscription streaming application. The continuity between the two phases is deliberate: when TV9 Network announced News9 Plus, it described the new service as the digital descendant of the earlier Bengaluru channel.

In both phases the defining characteristic has been English-language journalism aimed at an audience TV9 regarded as underserved. In 2009 that meant Bengaluru viewers who wanted city and Karnataka news in English, alongside national and international coverage. In the digital phase it has meant younger, mobile and connected-TV viewers who, in the network's assessment, increasingly choose what to watch and when to watch it instead of following a fixed television schedule. The name has stayed the same, but the definition of a channel around it has changed completely.

Launch in Bengaluru in 2009

News9 was launched in Bengaluru on 9 January 2009. It went on air on the same day as TV9 Mumbai, a Hindi news channel for Mumbai, as part of a wider expansion by the TV9 group beyond its original southern strongholds. Contemporary trade reporting described News9 as a Bengaluru-based English news channel and noted that it was the first English news channel in the city. Bengaluru already had round-the-clock Karnataka-focused news services in other languages, including TV9 Kannada, but no equivalent local service in English.

The investment behind the launch was reported at Rs 160 million for News9, within a combined Rs 380 million investment covering both News9 and the Mumbai channel. The launch was presented as a confident move rather than a soft trial, in line with the group's stated approach at the time. For TV9, the new channel also filled an obvious language gap in its own portfolio in Karnataka: with TV9 Kannada already established in the state, an English sister channel allowed the group to address two distinct audiences in the same market from the same city.

Ownership by Associated Broadcasting and the TV9 Network

News9 has always sat inside the TV9 group of channels. Those channels are a venture of Associated Broadcasting Company Private Limited, also referred to in early reporting as Associated Broadcasting Co. Pvt. Ltd and abbreviated as ABCL or ABCPL. The same company operates the wider TV9 Network, which TV9 itself describes as promoted by Associated Broadcasting Company Pvt. Ltd. That ownership link explains how News9 was launched, staffed and sold: at launch, reporting noted that TV9's existing sales team would also handle News9, and the new channel drew support from the group's national network of channels.

At the time of the 2009 expansion, the TV9 channels were headed by chief executive Ravi Prakash, who was credited in launch coverage as the driving force behind the group's channels. Editorially, Mahendra Mishra served as channel head for News9 and for TV9 in Karnataka, and he was the executive who explained the new channel's rationale to the trade press. Finance for the launch was discussed publicly by ABCL's finance leadership, including M. K. V. N. Murthy. In the network's later digital phase, the public face of News9's transformation has been Barun Das, the managing director and chief executive of TV9 Network, who announced the closure of the linear channel, championed the subscription model behind News9 Plus and hosts one of its best-known programmes.

Programming in the Linear Television Years

As a television channel, News9 was positioned as a fast and aggressive 24-hour news service. Its schedule mixed hard news and current affairs with entertainment, lifestyle and sports coverage, so that a Bengaluru viewer could move from breaking local stories to features and lighter material on a single channel. Launch coverage stressed that the channel would carry a mix of features and hard news, rather than presenting itself as a bulletin-only service, and that although it was a local channel, its content outlook was intended to be global.

Two early programmes illustrate that range. News9 launched a daily entertainment show, and in primetime it ran a half-hour crime programme called Wanted. Wanted was notable at the time because trade reporting described it as the first crime show on an Indian English news channel. Together, those two launches show the editorial bet the channel was making: English news in Bengaluru did not have to copy the format of the national English channels, and a city channel could experiment with programme types that national channels had not tried in English.

A Bengaluru Audience and a Southern Perspective

The audience News9 set out to serve was specific. It was aimed at young, upmarket viewers in Bengaluru, and its editorial pitch rested on a gap its leaders identified in the market. Speaking at the launch, channel head Mahendra Mishra argued that English news channels had largely ignored south India and that there was substantial potential for an English service in that part of the country. News9 was intended to fill that gap, with a fair share of South Indian content in its output.

That focus shaped its practical newsgathering as well as its editorial line. To strengthen city reporting, News9 set up six studios in Bengaluru from which live coverage could be carried out. Its on-air tagline in this period, about catching the big news live, reflected the emphasis on immediacy and on being present across the city it covered. Commercially, the channel leaned towards local advertisers, using TV9's sales operation, which suited a product whose value to advertisers lay precisely in its concentrated, city-specific audience rather than in undifferentiated national reach.

Place Within the Wider TV9 Bouquet

News9 was never a standalone venture. It was one part of a bouquet that grew, over time, into one of India's largest television news networks. The group's channels have included TV9 Telugu in Telugu, TV9 Kannada in Kannada, TV9 Gujarati, TV9 Marathi, the national Hindi channel TV9 Bharatvarsh, launched in 2019, and TV9 Bangla in Bengali, launched later. Within that family, News9 occupied the English position, and in Karnataka it was the direct sister of TV9 Kannada.

The comparison with other city-specific English services is instructive. Trade and reference coverage of News9 has noted that other metropolitan English news ventures of the same era, serving cities such as Delhi and Chennai, closed, leaving News9's long run from 2009 to 2020 as an unusually durable example of the city English news idea. Even TV9's own Mumbai city channel changed direction, becoming the Marathi-language TV9 Marathi in 2012. News9, by contrast, kept its English, Bengaluru identity for the whole of its linear life, and that identity is what the later digital brand inherited.

Closure of the Linear Channel in 2020

In 2020, TV9 Network decided to close News9 as a television channel and move its English news effort to digital platforms. The decision was announced by chief executive Barun Das in a fireside conversation reported by the trade press that year, and later coverage from the network's own announcements confirms that the English channel was shut in 2020 so that the company could expand its digital platform instead. News9 had by then been on television for more than a decade.

Das explained the reasoning in audience terms. He argued that English television news in India had shrunk in viewership and revenue, that younger viewers were not watching conventional news channels, and that a city-based English television offering was not yet viable in the Indian market. Rather than abandon English news altogether, the network's answer was to take the business call to close the city channel and return with a national version of News9, but on digital platforms, including what he described as digital web television. That distinction matters: 2020 was the end of News9 as a broadcast channel, not the end of News9 as a brand.

Reinvention as a Digital-First English Brand

The digital News9 that followed was built as an integrated set of products rather than a single stream. The network describes News9 as India's first fully integrated English news brand across digital platforms. Its components are a publishing platform, News9Live.com, a 24-hour video streaming service carried on connected televisions and social platforms under the News9 Live name, and the News9 Plus over-the-top platform. In a later consolidation, TV9 Network brought those elements together under the name News9 Mediaverse, presenting News9 Plus, News9 Live and News9Live.com as three streams integrated into one service.

The strategic logic was the mirror image of the 2009 launch. Where the original channel had been local in geography and linear in delivery, the new service was national and international in ambition and on-demand in delivery. The network has described the target viewer with a term it coined, GenFlix, meaning an English news audience accustomed to streaming entertainment on its own terms and short of time. It has also developed international-facing strands within the brand, including a service presenting news from India for global audiences. The headquarters story changed with the format: the brand that began in Bengaluru was now run as a national digital operation, while continuing to trade on its Bengaluru origins.

News9 Plus, Duologue and On-Demand News

The most distinctive element of the digital reinvention is News9 Plus, announced in early 2022 with a beta launch followed by a full public launch planned for late March of that year. TV9 Network presented it as the world's first pure-play subscription-driven, on-demand news product, and it has since been described as the world's first news OTT platform. Instead of a rolling 24-hour live format, News9 Plus was designed around in-depth stories with a long shelf life, released in seasonal formats, combining the depth of a news magazine with the production techniques of streaming entertainment. The service was initially free and was intended to become subscription-driven, without reliance on advertising, aimed at discerning English news consumers.

The editorial team for News9 Plus was led by editor Sandeep Unnithan, formerly an editor of India Today magazine. Its catalogue has spanned documentaries, web series, news bulletins and talk formats across subjects including politics, defence, international affairs, business, crime, lifestyle and geopolitics, with subscription plans later offered for 30, 90 and 365 days. Its flagship conversation series, Duologue with Barun Das, launched in 2022, features extended one-to-one exchanges between the TV9 Network chief and prominent guests, freed from headline-driven interview conventions. Guests in its first season included actor Vijay Deverakonda, with whom the series debuted, former British prime minister David Cameron, Narayana Murthy and Sudha Murty, and cardiologist Devi Shetty, who appeared in the season finale aired around World Heart Day. News9 Plus and Das both received transformational brand and leader recognition from WCRCINT in 2023, reflecting how central the experiment had become to the network's public identity.

Later Expansion and Legacy

In its digital phase, News9 has continued to test what an English news brand can carry. Its 24-hour digital stream, News9 Live, has run themed programming initiatives, such as special coverage around World Heart Day, with programmes premiering on connected television before appearing on YouTube. In a widely reported first for an Indian news network, News9 broadcast a professional football match live, showing Bayer Leverkusen's 1-0 German Cup victory over Bayern Munich at the Allianz Arena, a match decided by a second-half header from substitute Nathan Tella after Bayern goalkeeper Manuel Neuer had been sent off in the 17th minute. TV9 Network presented the broadcast as evidence that news programming could extend into live sport for a digital-era audience.

The brand has also been carried onto conference stages through the News9 Global Summit, including a WAVES edition staged during the World Audio Visual and Entertainment Summit in Mumbai in May 2025 and a UAE edition in Dubai in 2025 focused on India-UAE ties, where Duologue-style conversations were presented live on stage. Taken together, these ventures show how far the name has travelled from a single-city channel with six Bengaluru studios. News9's legacy is therefore twofold: it proved, over eleven years, that a city-specific English television channel could sustain itself in Bengaluru, and it then became TV9 Network's test bed for the proposition that English news in India would move first, and fastest, from the television schedule to the stream.