Sakhi TV: Malayalam Television's First Channel for Women
Sakhi TV was a Malayalam-language free-to-air satellite channel based in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, and it holds a specific distinction in Indian television history: it was promoted as the first women's television channel in Malayalam. Launched on 17 August 2014, Sakhi TV set out to build a general entertainment service in which women were not one audience segment among many but the centre of the entire schedule — empowerment, health, family, fashion, culture and entertainment programming made for and largely by women.
The channel's life on air was comparatively short, and later industry discussions list Sakhi TV among Kerala's defunct channels. Its story is nonetheless worth recording in full: a publicly promoted company, a prominent founding team drawn from cinema, public life and social work, a carefully staged launch on the first day of the Malayalam month of Chingam, and a mission — a television voice for the empowered Indian woman — that was stated with unusual clarity for a regional channel of its time.
Overview
Sakhi Television described its own endeavour in unambiguous terms: it envisioned the empowerment of women, and it aimed to become the voice of the empowered Indian woman. The channel planned social issues coverage, public service campaigns for women and children, thought-provoking programmes and entertainment, integrated so that its broadcasts would have an impact in the real world beyond the screen.
As a free-to-air channel, Sakhi TV depended on advertising, and its management argued from the outset that its niche was commercially logical: women play an important role in household purchase decisions, and brands catering to women therefore had reason to support a channel that addressed them directly all day. The channel also planned a 24-hour helpline for women, underlining that it conceived of itself as a service and an advocacy platform, not merely a programme stream.
History and Launch
The company behind the channel, Sakhi Television Communications India, was officially formed on 8 February, headquartered in Thiruvananthapuram, and Sakhi TV was its first venture. Early announcements in 2012 and 2013 anticipated an earlier launch — at one stage the channel was expected on air by the first half of 2013 — and test signals were carried on Intelsat 17 at 66 degrees East while preparations continued. The corporate office and post-production studio were inaugurated at Tower View, Karamana, in Thiruvananthapuram.
The official launch finally took place on 17 August 2014, the first day of Chingam in the Malayalam calendar, with the launch event held at 6.30 pm. The choice of date was symbolic: Chingam 1 is the Malayalam New Year, a day of new beginnings, for a channel that presented itself as a new beginning for women in Malayalam media. Trade coverage at the time described Sakhi straightforwardly as the first women's Malayalam television channel.
Ownership and Leadership
Sakhi TV was promoted by Sakhi Television Communications India, a public limited company whose leadership mixed business, cinema and public life. Neena R. Pillai, described as a businesswoman and social worker, was the chairperson. The Malayalam film director Rajasenan served as chief executive officer. Sriraj Menon, a television programme producer, was managing director, and Bindu Balakrishnan — a censor board member and Kerala State Film Academy member — was among the company's senior figures.
The wider founding circle reinforced the channel's public positioning. The veteran actor Urvasi Sarada was listed as chief patroness, Nilambur Aisha as a vice-chairperson, and politician Simi Rosebell John and film actor Ambika also served as vice-chairpersons. In its earlier pre-launch phase, renowned director Siddique was announced as the channel's creative head. It was, in other words, a leadership visibly fronted by women and by respected names from Malayalam cinema — a deliberate signal of the audience the channel intended to serve and the credibility it sought.
Programming and Schedule
About 80 per cent of the channel's content was planned to focus on women, spanning empowerment, fashion, health, entertainment, culture and beauty. Managing director Sriraj Menon explained the aim at the time of the afaqs! launch coverage: the channel wanted to help women benefit and widen their knowledge in all domains through its programming. The founding materials added social issues, coverage intended to pursue justice, and public service campaigns for women and children to that mix.
The channel's promoters spoke of synchronising commercial success with content integrity, focused on its campaign for the betterment of women in India and abroad. In practical schedule terms, that meant a general entertainment channel built for a female audience across the day — family and lifestyle material, health and beauty content, cultural programming and entertainment — rather than a narrow single-subject service, with the planned 24-hour women's helpline running alongside the broadcast offering as a point of direct contact with viewers.
Language and Regional Focus
Sakhi TV broadcast in Malayalam and was rooted in Kerala — headquartered in Thiruvananthapuram, staffed from the state's media world, and led by figures from Malayalam public life. Yet its stated ambition reached beyond the state: the channel spoke of crusading for women across India and abroad, and of becoming a respected and talked-about channel nationally.
That dual focus — a Kerala channel with a national mission statement — reflected the size of the Malayali audience outside Kerala as much as within it. A Malayalam channel on satellite is watched in the Gulf and across India wherever Malayali families live, and a women's channel speaking Malayalam could plausibly address that entire diaspora in a way no Hindi or English women's service of the period attempted.
Technology and Broadcast Infrastructure
For a new tier-two broadcaster, Sakhi TV made notably professional technology choices, and its launch was used by its vendors as a showcase. The channel signed a technology agreement with Harmonic, deploying the Spectrum ChannelPort integrated channel playout system for ingest and playout, the Ellipse 3100 contribution encoder, and the ProView 7100 integrated receiver-decoder, stream processor and transcoder for contribution. The integration was facilitated by systems integrator RGB Broadcasting.
Harmonic's India general manager at the time framed the launch as an important milestone for India's broadcast industry and an example of how affordable video delivery infrastructure could let the country's expanding tier-two broadcast market take new channels to air simply and successfully. Distribution was via Intelsat 17 at 66 degrees East, with published technical parameters — vertical polarisation, a frequency around 3967.5 MHz, symbol rate 8800 and DVB-S2 8PSK modulation — that allowed free-to-air reception by dish owners and carriage negotiations with cable and DTH platforms.
Availability and Platforms
Sakhi TV was a free-to-air satellite channel, so its availability rested on two legs: direct reception from Intelsat 17 by viewers with suitable dishes, and carriage on cable and DTH platforms. In its active years it circulated on Kerala cable systems, and Malayalam viewers in the Gulf encountered it through regional satellite packages, where forum reports from 2016 already noted its signals were at times unstable — an early sign of the fragility that would mark its later years.
The channel maintained an official website at sakhi.tv and promoted itself through the standard channels of the period. Its free-to-air status meant no subscription barrier stood between its intended audience and its programmes; the constraint was always carriage and continuity rather than price.
Audience and Market
Sakhi TV entered a Malayalam general entertainment market led by powerful incumbents with deep film libraries and serial franchises. Its answer was differentiation: where rivals programmed for the whole family and measured women as a prime-time demographic, Sakhi made women the explicit, all-day centre of the channel, and pitched advertisers on the purchasing influence of that audience.
It was a coherent strategy on paper — a defined niche, a sympathetic advertiser category, and first-mover distinction as Malayalam's women's channel. The difficulties that niche channels face in India are equally structural, however: carriage costs, the price of fresh entertainment content, and the challenge of converting a respected mission into daily viewing habits strong enough to sustain a satellite service.
Later Years and Closure
The channel's later history is documented mainly in the satellite-tracking community's records, and they tell a story of gradual disappearance. Forum reports in 2018 noted that DTH platforms had removed the channel some time earlier, that it had remained available on cable until around the second quarter of that year, and that one major cable operator was telling enquirers the channel might resume by November. By 2020, satellite watchers were reporting Sakhi TV not available from Intelsat 17 at 66 degrees East and asking whether anyone knew the reasons.
Subsequent discussions of Malayalam television history have settled the question in the past tense: in a 2025 forum survey of defunct Malayalam channels, Sakhi TV was named alongside other closed services such as Bharath TV, Indiavision, TV New and Mangalam TV. No relaunch followed. The channel that launched on Chingam 1 in 2014 as the voice of the empowered Indian woman thus survives as a documented experiment — significant for what it attempted, and instructive about how hard that attempt was to sustain.
Legacy
Sakhi TV's legacy is the idea it proved could be launched, even if not indefinitely sustained: a Malayalam channel conceived, led and programmed around women, promoted by a company chaired by a woman, with a film director as chief executive and some of the most respected women in Kerala's public life attached to its founding. Its launch coverage in national trade media, its professional playout infrastructure, and its explicit empowerment mission made it more than a footnote among regional channel launches of 2014.
For worldnm.com's record of Indian television, Sakhi TV stands as Thiruvananthapuram's distinctive contribution to the Malayalam channel boom of the 2010s — the first women's channel in the language, free-to-air on Intelsat 17, and a reminder that the era's expansion of regional broadcasting included genuine attempts to serve audiences the mainstream had treated as a segment rather than a centre.
