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 1: South Asian TV in America faces its toughest winter yet
A deep dive into how traditional South Asian TV networks in the U.S. are struggling amid rising tariffs, falling ad sales, and fragmented audiences.
By Kevin Rego
Autumn is fading in New York. Central Park’s leaves — once lush and green — now lie in soft drifts of pale yellow and gold along the winding paths. The air has sharpened, the trees are nearly bare, and the light grows weaker each day. Winter is coming.
For South Asian television in America, a similar winter is approaching. The long, predictable era of linear dominance — habitual viewing, loyal audiences, and channels that once felt unshakeable — is losing its leaves too.
A Larger, Wealthier Diaspora… Yet a Colder Reality
It is the paradox of the moment: more than 5.1 million South Asians now call America home, forming one of the youngest and most affluent rising communities in the country, yet the television made for them is struggling to keep pace. Nearly 75 South Asian channels now battle for a shrinking $100 million market. Asian American viewing trends — the closest mirror to South Asian behavior — show why: 53% of viewing is streaming, 20% goes to YouTube, 87% of households own a connected TV, 71% prefer streaming over cable. The audience didn’t disappear. It migrated.
Adris Chakraborty, Founder of Mediamorphisis & LYKSTAGE (a fusion platform offering both OTT and viewer generated videos) elucidates it, “We’re witnessing a complete rewiring of how South Asians consume video. The linear model is slowly dying because non-linear, on-demand viewing has become the natural habit of modern audiences.”
But migration also exposed a long-ignored weakness. That of lack of investment in local content “Ask yourself — how many South Asian channels created content for this market? For years, the revenue flowed in and then right back to India. So, when the streaming wave arrived, viewers drifted because there was never a deep, local relationship to keep them. Says Monica Sadhu, a South Asian TV veteran with extensive US market experience.
A Delivery Drama That Outshines the Serials
No network reflects the turbulence better than Star TV. In 2015, Star moved everything to Hotstar; in 2019, after Disney’s takeover, its content was folded into Hulu — but not placed on the homepage, forcing viewers to dig through the search bar just to find it. By 2023, Star re-launched on Dish and Sling, yet some of its content continued to sit quietly on Hulu. And now, with JioStar expected to arrive in 2026 and reportedly include Colors programming following the Star–Colors merger, the carousel is set to spin once more. How can a viewer stay loyal when the content itself keeps changing addresses?
Sony, for its part, remains arguably the strongest of the Indian GECs in America, retaining deep consumer trust. Yet even Sony recognises where the gravitational pull now lies. ‘The Kapil Sharma Show’ and ‘Crime Patrol’ have both migrated to Netflix, a clear sign of how decisively the audience has shifted toward streaming.
ZEE, meanwhile, exited Sling and Dish — the two platforms that dominate South Asian TV viewing in the US — and its stellar distribution team quickly added the channel to Spectrum, YouTube TV, and FuboTV. But these newer platforms still don’t command a significant South Asian subscriber base. Industry insiders say ZEE hopes to return to Sling and Dish but remains hesitant to include ZEE5 in the bundle, the key sticking point halting progress.
Amid all this movement, only one giant remains steady: Willow TV.
With exclusive rights to the IPL, ICC tournaments, and major international cricket tours — and capturing a disproportionately large share of total South Asian TV revenue — Willow stands as the industry’s strongest pillar. But one fortress alone cannot stabilize an entire landscape already trembling beneath it.
The Generational Shift: A Battle for Relevance
Netflix, Prime Video, YouTube, Reels, and TikTok now dominate daily consumption among South Asians in America. The shift has been swift and decisive: Millennials have drifted, and Gen Z barely acknowledges linear television at all. To them, traditional TV feels slow, outdated, and “6 and 7.”
This generational detachment didn’t happen suddenly; it has been years in the making. As audiences embraced fast, personalized, on-demand viewing, broadcasters continued programming for an era when families still gathered at 8pm sharp. “Millennials in America have already abandoned the kind of general entertainment Indian TV continues to serve. As for Gen Z, their connection with traditional television barely exists at all.” Says Monica Sadhu. But the challenge runs deeper than shifting tastes.
Even as viewers moved fluidly across devices, creators, and short-form platforms, broadcasters remained locked into legacy distribution models. Adris Chakraborty explains the mismatch: “The viewer evolved faster than the industry. Legacy models trapped broadcasters while audiences moved on.”
This shift delivered a financial shock. As younger and urban South Asians spent more time on Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, and social platforms, advertisers followed instantly — exposing how dependent South Asian TV has been on advertising rather than subscriptions. Neeta Bhasin, President & CEO of ASB Communications, and a pioneer of South Asian advertising and marketing in USA summarizes the reality: “Younger South Asians are spending more time on OTT. When ad budgets move there, traditional TV feels the impact immediately because it relies far more on advertising than on subscriptions.”
Piracy, Tariffs & Structural Weaknesses
Another unspoken enemy is piracy. The notorious “box” -once a Canadian staple, now floods the US market, offering: 1,000+ channels from every major South-Asian network with HD streams at barely $10 a month
Dish Network has filed federal indictments against many of these illegal operators, yet they re-emerge under new identities. For many households, these boxes have become a default substitute for legal television — draining millions from legitimate broadcasters.
Add to this the 50% tariff on Indian imports imposed by Trump, which has squeezed South Asian retailers and shrunk airtime budgets. Several second-tier channels like B4U Music have gone free-to-air, leaning on programmatic ad revenue. Punjabi and Telugu channels survive on razor-thin margins. Hindi Movie channels can hardly keep up with the content that Netflix and Amazon dishes out.
Brands on South Asian TV
There is one silver lining, though. Brands that once dismissed diaspora media as “niche” are slowly returning with sharper intent. Toyota and Lexus continue to roll out Hindi-language voiceovers. McDonald’s has crafted Diwali and Ramadan creatives. Even Amazon has expanded its digital co-op marketing with diaspora platforms, recognizing the crossover buying power of Indian-origin consumers. But here’s the catch — very few South Asian channels are benefiting.
A senior executive from a non-GEC network, who preferred not to be named, breaks down the real barrier: “Nielsen and comScore ell the real story of why South Asian channels can’t break into the mainstream ad market — they simply don’t have the numbers, or the digital impressions, to compete at that level.”
US vs UK: Why One Market Leads
The UK is far ahead of the US in South Asian TV because it has BARB, a single, trusted ratings currency — and sales houses like Sky Media, Axiom, and 360 Media Sales that bundle Asian channels into national media buys.
And it’s not just BARB. The UK media ecosystem treats Asian TV as part of the national landscape. Asian tiers on Sky and Virgin have existed for nearly two decades, giving planners reliable audience data and making these channels genuinely “buyable” at scale.
In the US, there is no unified measurement system. Each South Asian network pitches individually, with inconsistent metrics and no central currency — leaving money, scale, and mainstream visibility on the table. Emerging Media, once the closest American equivalent to the UK’s multicultural hubs, is no longer the force it once was, with only residual budgets flowing into the South-Asian TV space from this media sales house.
Can Spring Return?
South Asian TV in America has survived VHS tapes, satellite dishes, cable bundles, and even the first wave of streaming disruption. So perhaps this moment is not destruction — it is simply winter Neeta Bhasin remains cautiously optimistic: “Linear TV will stay strong, but it will have to expand through OTT platforms.” Adris Chakraborty echoes the sentiment from another angle: “South Asian TV will continue to exist, but largely for audiences 50 and above who grew up with traditional television.”
The industry now stands in that cold — a landscape of shifting platforms, drifting audiences, shrinking budgets, and viewing habits that no longer belong to this era. And yet, winter is also a season of clarity. It forces reinvention. It demands honesty. It reveals what can endure and what must evolve. As Rumi wrote in The Great Wagon: “When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.”
It is a line about stillness — the kind that settles over everything in winter, when the surface freezes but the soil underneath quietly prepares for renewal. Whether spring returns for South Asian television will depend on how boldly it sheds the old, embraces the new, and adapts before the frost becomes permanent.
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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
