A. STN
B. GEO NEWS
C. ARY NEWS
D. 92NEWS
Submitted by: Mehran Ali
Shalimar Television Network (STN) was the first semi governmental television channel of Pakistan, the first to break up the monopoly of state-owned Pakistan Television (PTV). STN started its broadcast in 1990 with the name of People’s Television Network (PTN) under the umbrella of Shalimar Recording Company from Islamabad. Later on, its transmissions were started from Karachi, Lahore and by the mid-1990s, it was available in the whole country at terrestrial beam.
PTN under settlements with CNN International of USA and British Broadcasting Corporation, BBC of UK started rebroadcast of the programmings of CNN International channel and BBC World. In the same year, PTN in an agreement with Interflow (a private company) started a time slot by the name of , Network Television Marketing (NTM) which came as a breath of fresh air after General Zia-ul-Haq’s military dictatorship era of the 1980s, and with its unique and entertainment-filled programmings, it gave tough competition to PTV at prime time evening TV viewing time.[1] In 1999, NTM had to quit the airwaves because of the financial crunch. Right after this, STN also ended the slots of CNN Intentional, BBC World and DW. Under a settlement with PTV Network, STN became “Channel-3”.[1] A Satellite beam was also arranged for STN/Channel-3 and it started its broadcast from PTV Academy. Each rebroadcast station of STN on terrestrial airwaves was connected to the satellite beam of STN/Channel. Channel-3 started its regular transmission in 2000 as an all-purpose channel. Slots of ‘Prime Entertainment’ program and ‘Sunday TV’ program were quite popular among the audience as the quality of entertainment programmings were quite good. In 2005, STN/Channel-3 went off the air and the parent company Shalimar Recording and Broadcasting Company signed an agreement with Sports Star International to start the first ever semi-private channel of Pakistan ATV (Pakistan) channel, the collaboration stayed intact till 2018. Since 2018, ATV is being run under SRBC solely as a semi-government TV Channel.
