Opinion
Across the Pond: South Asian TV in Canada; A Market on Life Support
By Kevin Rego
17 February 2026
Piracy packages: Inset – a local distributor’s website displaying packages, number of channels, and pricing
Across The Pond: The South Asian Media Beat in America
A monthly column that explores how South Asian media and entertainment navigate the fast-changing American landscape.
Edition 2: South Asian television in Canada has been overtaken by piracy, streaming, and an industry that failed to evolve with its audience. What was once a vital cultural lifeline now stands fragile and fading, its survival no longer guaranteed.
The cable box sits gathering dust. Beneath the television, an IPTV device blinks, over 5000 plus channels for a fraction of the cable price. On the coffee table, a smartphone glows with YouTube clips, Hotstar highlights, Instagram reels. This is the modern Canadian South Asian household, where traditional television has become irrelevant.
For decades, Canada’s South Asian television ecosystem, anchored by ATN (Asian Television Network) and Ethnic Channels Group (ECG), served as the cultural bridge for millions. But in 2026, that bridge is crumbling under forces that would challenge even a healthy market. The problem: this market was never healthy to begin with.
Built on Quicksand
Unlike the United States, where ZEE and Star built stable decades-long operations, Canada’s South Asian TV market has lurched from crisis to crisis since the 1990s. ZEE TV arrived with genuine excitement but suffered through multiple licensing partners, distribution fights, and regulatory hurdles. Legal battles erupted, including contentious disputes between ATN and ZEE over distribution rights.
Sony TV and B4U remained with ATN, providing it with some continuity in entertainment programming. But the broader ecosystem was already beginning to fracture. Several news networks chose to align with Ethnic Channels Group (ECG), splitting distribution and weakening the unified cable model that had sustained the industry.
Star India, meanwhile, brought enormous prestige with ‘Kaun Banega Crorepati’ and a slate of highly rated soaps and serials that drew loyal audiences. Yet even at the height of its popularity, instability persisted. Star launched Hotstar in 2015 and soon became locked in legal disputes
with ATN, before ultimately shutting down its linear channels entirely and shifting its programming to streaming. For viewers, the transition was abrupt and disorienting. For the industry, it marked a turning point, the moment when traditional cable lost its grip.
As ZEE and Star slipped from its grasp, ATN launched ROOTS, their own streaming platform, in a bid to reclaim control. But in a market already migrating toward direct and digital access, the platform failed to gain meaningful adoption and was eventually shut down.
The exception? Punjabi programming thrived because the community built its own ecosystem—gurdwara content, local news, community programming that resonated in Brampton, Surrey, and Abbotsford. But this masked a deeper truth: the broader market never matured, never scaled, leaving it uniquely vulnerable when disruption arrived.
Timeline: The shift in control for the Asian television market over time in Canada
The Perfect Storm
By 2010, the first cracks became visible. Willow TV launched independently, breaking ATN’s monopoly on cricket broadcasting. That same year, illegal IPTV boxes began appearing in South Asian neighborhoods, crude at first, but functional enough to pose a threat. Between 2010 and 2016, piracy evolved from fringe phenomenon to mainstream alternative. The technology improved dramatically while prices plummeted. What started as a trickle became a flood.
Today, Canada’s South Asian television faces simultaneous collapse on three fronts, each reinforcing the others in a vicious cycle.
First, subscribers are vanishing at catastrophic rates. Over 400,000 Canadian households cancelled cable in two years. The packages that once seemed reasonably priced now compete against illegal IPTV boxes offering 5,000+ channels including every South Asian network imaginable from around the globe, for $10 monthly or $150 lifetime. Or as the image in this column from a popular local distributor website indicates, it’s even cheaper!
Slava Levin, CEO of Ethnic Channels Group, captures how the threat has metastasized: “Piracy has evolved far beyond South Asian content. The pirate platforms now carry Canadian domestic channels right beside South Asian networks. From a consumer viewpoint, why pay expensive cable bills when pirates offer everything for $10 a month? This is a full-scale replication of the Canadian broadcasting system inside an illegal platform.”
Without enforcement, piracy operates brazenly in Canada—devices sold in grocery stores, services advertised on social media, installation support provided like any legitimate product.
Dr. Shan Chandrasekar, President & CEO of ATN, through a spokesperson, provides the scale: “IPTV piracy penetration amongst South Asian households is among the highest of any ethnocultural segment. Prices can be as low as $10 monthly for over 5,000 channels including VOD content from South Asian OTT players plus Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, Apple TV.”
Industry estimates suggest 30–40% audience migration to piracy, but insiders privately believe it exceeds 60%.
Second, younger viewers have abandoned linear TV entirely. When Hotstar launched in 2017, there was brief hope it might channel cord-cutters toward legitimate streaming. Instead, it simply
Related to this
.
coexisted with piracy while Gen-Z and millennials migrated to YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok for cultural content.
Abhijeet Ray, CEO of Creative Joy Consultancy and former MD of Ethnicity Matters, confirms the rupture: “When it comes to Gen Z, the shift has totally happened, don’t think there are any takers of linear ethnic TV content anymore.”
Third, advertisers are fleeing toward measurable digital platforms. The CEO of Lionheart Production House, Roger Nair, who has fought piracy since working with RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) to charge over 10 pirating companies in 2007, explains: “Advertisers are moving money to digital platforms where audiences are measurable and piracy isn’t a problem.”
Levin identifies the death spiral: “Piracy converts real viewers into unmeasured viewers, making ethnic TV appear far smaller on paper. This doesn’t only destroy subscription revenue. It destroys the advertising base that multicultural broadcasting depends on.”
The Enforcement Vacuum
The contrast with America is damning. Chris Kuelling, Executive Director of IBCAP (International Broadcaster Coalition Against Piracy), has systematically dismantled a part of the U.S. piracy infrastructure: “We’ve taken down Jadoo, Shava, Chitram, Desi and many more. Jadoo paid $1.5M and shut down worldwide. We’ve won judgments against hosting companies—Datacamp settled for $3M, Virtual Systems owes $41M.”
But IBCAP doesn’t operate in Canada. “There has not been a focus on multicultural pirates by programmers, content owners, or distributors like ATN in Canada,” Kuelling notes. “If IBCAP (www.ibcap.org) were hired by ATN and content owners to protect Canada, we believe we would have a major impact there as we have had in the U.S.
Without enforcement, piracy operates brazenly in Canada, devices sold in grocery stores, services advertised on social media, installation support provided like any legitimate product.
Levin is blunt: “Every household that moves to piracy is almost impossible to win back. The illegal product is too complete, too convenient, too cheap. The regulated system has no chance without government action.”
Can This Be Saved?
The paradox is that demand has never been stronger. Dr. Chandrasekar points to the foundation: “In the 2021 Census, 2.67 million Canadians identified as South Asian—the largest racialized group in Canada. There’s stable and diversified demand for in-language, culturally relevant content in Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Bengali.”
The market exists and continues expanding with immigration. But as cable prices climbed and enforcement remained absent, viewers didn’t abandon television—they simply found it elsewhere, beyond the reach of the system meant to protect it. Now the legitimate delivery mechanism is collapsing.
Levin’s prognosis is stark: “If the CRTC (Canada’s federal regulator) continues ignoring commercial-scale piracy, legal South Asian TV will shrink dramatically. Channels will consolidate or shut down. This is a looming system failure of the entire multicultural broadcasting framework.”
Yet paths forward exist. Kuelling’s partial U.S. success proves aggressive enforcement works. Dr. Chandrasekar identifies content differentiation as critical: “Broadcasters need to produce content that reflects Canadian-born South Asian experiences. Canadianized content will be the differentiator.”
Ray offers surprising optimism: “We will see a surge in new local content production built around South Asian passion points, cricket, Bollywood, music.”
A Reckoning
South Asian television in Canada was built on unstable ground from the start, shaped by broadcaster exits, legal battles, and a market too small for Indian television giants to commit fully. Now, facing normalised piracy and generational abandonment that fragility has become terminal.
The demand hasn’t disappeared. The 2.6 million-strong community still wants culturally relevant content. But unless enforcement and adaptation arrive soon very soon, legal South Asian television in Canada may simply fade into irrelevance.
—
Kevin Rego, former B4U North America Business Head, spent 15 years in London’s South Asian media circuit before moving to the United States more than a decade ago. An avid writer, he now runs the boutique marketing agency Ivory Task Inc. in New York and closely tracks the evolving South Asian media landscape on both sides of the Atlantic
