OdishaLIVE: Bhubaneswar's Pioneering Web Channel and Digital Media Agency
OdishaLIVE is a Bhubaneswar-based digital media platform that has covered news, culture and lifestyle from Odisha since 2012, combining text reporting with an extensive video operation through its web channel. Founded by veteran journalist Nilambar Rath, it describes itself as a homegrown web channel network of Odisha, publishing through its portal at odisha.live and through social platforms that include a YouTube channel with more than one million subscribers. Unusually among news portals, OdishaLIVE is also a media and communication services agency, empanelled with government departments and working for corporate and development-sector clients. That dual identity — newsroom and agency under one roof — has made it one of the most influential digital media brands to emerge from Odisha.
Founding in 2012 and the Founder's Background
Nilambar Rath forayed into media entrepreneurship in 2012, when he founded OdishaLIVE. He brought to the venture a career of roughly three decades in journalism and communication: he is a communication specialist, documentary filmmaker, media educator and veteran journalist, and he had earlier served as editor with television organisations including the ETV Network, News18 Odia and Naxatra News, leading news floors and management at leading regional and national media organisations. That television background explains the platform's defining bet — that Odisha's digital future would be led by video. While many early Odisha websites were text extensions of newspapers, OdishaLIVE was conceived as a web channel, producing news and features in both text and video from the start. Bhabani Mohanty serves as Co-Founder and Director of the organisation, and its headquarters are in Bhubaneswar, with its office located in the Samanta Vihar area near Nalco Square in Chandrasekharpur.
A Web Channel Network, Not Just a Website
OdishaLIVE runs several web and social media platforms rather than a single site. Its content is accessible through the odisha.live portal and through its social channels, of which YouTube is the largest: the OdishaLIVE YouTube channel has crossed the one million subscriber mark, a scale reached by few Odisha-based digital publishers. Over the years, the platform says, it has become a digital repository of Indian art, culture, history, heritage, language, people and events, as well as startups and entrepreneurship. That archive function distinguishes it from a breaking-news feed: interviews, cultural documentaries, festival coverage and entrepreneur stories remain watchable and searchable long after publication, building a library of Odisha's public life on video. The 2016 Odisha CSR Summit, at which a special logo was unveiled to celebrate the channel passing one crore — ten million — views on YouTube, shows how early that video audience was built: the milestone was already being celebrated within four years of founding.
News, Culture and Lifestyle Coverage
Editorially, OdishaLIVE ranges well beyond daily politics. Its home brief — news, culture and lifestyle from Odisha — allows it to cover the state's festivals, classical and folk arts, cinema, food, personalities and places alongside current affairs. Odisha's cultural calendar, from Rath Yatra in Puri to regional festivals and literary events, gives a video-led platform rich material, and OdishaLIVE has positioned itself as a chronicler of that heritage for both residents and the Odia diaspora. Its 'Startup Story' series, produced in association with Startup Odisha and with industry partners including TiE Bhubaneswar and FICCI, profiled Odia entrepreneurs such as NestAway co-founder Amarendra Sahu in conversation with figures like Subroto Bagchi — evidence of an editorial interest in the state's new economy and its founders, not only its politicians. This breadth has helped the brand present Odisha to itself, and to outside audiences, as a place of culture and enterprise as much as of politics and disaster headlines.
The Agency: Media and Communication Services
Alongside publishing, OdishaLIVE operates a leading media and communication services wing, offering media and digital services to government departments, corporate clients and United Nations agencies, among others. It is an empanelled agency for various government departments, and a partner to corporate and development-sector organisations for more than a decade. The services described across its hiring and partnership material include video production, digital and social media work, content development, branding, design and campaigns. For a regional digital publisher, agency income of this kind provides a business model that pure advertising on a news site rarely can in a state market — and it turns the newsroom's own skills in video and social storytelling into a sellable service. It also means the organisation recruits across journalism, design and production: its 2025 hiring, for example, sought senior and junior graphic designers in Bhubaneswar skilled across the Adobe design and motion-graphics suite, reflecting the volume of visual work the agency produces.
Social Impact and Development Partnerships
A third strand of OdishaLIVE's work is social-impact communication. The organisation partners with development organisations on social-impact initiatives, and its extended family includes health-communication ventures: Nilambar Rath is associated as a co-founder with the IFI Foundation and with Swasthya Plus, a digital health platform whose network reports that more than a hundred million people a year rely on its videos for health decisions, and whose Hindi channel alone passed five hundred thousand subscribers. OdishaLIVE's own convening power in this space was visible as early as April 2016, when it organised the Odisha CSR Summit in association with the KIIT School of Rural Management at KIIT University, Bhubaneswar, bringing industrial houses, CSR heads and experts together on 'CSR and Inclusive Growth', inaugurated by the state industries and education minister. That pattern — media platform as convener of government, business and civil society — remains characteristic of how the organisation operates in Odisha's public life.
Collaboration: The News Room Partnership
OdishaLIVE has continued to formalise collaborations within Odisha's digital media sector. In September, it signed a Memorandum of Understanding with News Room, a digital news platform founded by editor Manoranjan Mishra, to share knowledge and explore opportunities in the evolving media and communication landscape of Odisha and beyond. The MoU was signed at OdishaLIVE's Bhubaneswar office by Nilambar Rath as Founder and CEO, with Co-Founder and Director Bhabani Mohanty present, and for News Room by its founding editor and its co-founder and CEO Priyadarshi Bal. The stated aim was to drive innovation and strategic growth in media production and digital content. For two independent Odisha digital brands to pool knowledge in this way reflects a maturing sector: scale, technology and advertiser expectations increasingly reward collaboration over the lone-portal model of the early 2010s.
Bhubaneswar Base and Odisha's Digital Moment
OdishaLIVE's Bhubaneswar base places it in the centre of the state's political, educational and technology life. Bhubaneswar, the capital, hosts the state government, a cluster of universities and institutes, an IT sector and the headquarters of many of the organisations the agency serves. OdishaLIVE was founded just as smartphone adoption and social video were transforming Indian media consumption, and as Odisha's own digital infrastructure expanded. Being early mattered: the channel accumulated subscribers, archives, government empanelment and client relationships over more than a decade, advantages that later entrants have found hard to replicate. Listings of the company describe it as a bootstrapped media and entertainment business based in Bhubaneswar, founded in the early 2010s, with a compact team — a reminder that its reach has been built with a newsroom-agency staff of dozens rather than hundreds.
Significance and Outlook
OdishaLIVE matters to the story of Indian regional media because it demonstrated, from a state capital outside the metros, that a journalist-led digital venture could build a million-subscriber video channel, a cultural archive, a government-empanelled communication agency and a social-impact portfolio on a single brand. Its founder's passage from television editor to digital entrepreneur mirrors the journey of Indian news itself over the same period. The platform's present agenda — partnerships such as the News Room MoU, continued agency growth, and health and development communication through its wider network — suggests its next phase will be defined less by being first and more by being connected: linking Odisha's media, institutions and audiences in a digital ecosystem it helped to create.
