My first job in media was at ZEE, back when Dr Subhash Chandra, “SC” to everyone in the building, was the Chairman. The first time I heard the line “If content is king, distribution is God” was from him. I have heard it a hundred times since, usually from people who don’t really mean it. But it’s never fit a situation better than this one.
There’s a version of the UK South Asian TV market you only see if you stop comparing channel to channel and start comparing platform to platform. On Sky, Pakistani television has a real audience, including a good chunk of Indian viewers who tune in too. Switch over to Virgin, and that same television just isn’t there. Not underperforming, not buried on page 40 of the TV EPG guide. Gone. It was never carried in the first place.
Look at the BARB numbers over 15 months (January 2025 to March 2026) and you will see a small but steady crossover audience for Pakistani channels on satellite. Viewers classified as Indian were watching ARY Digital, Geo TV and Hum Europe consistently across the period, 1.97% of all Indian satellite viewing over those 15 months. Sounds tiny, and against the wider total it is, but it’s not a blip. It shows up month after month. That consistency is the tell, a rounding error doesn’t repeat like that.
Now try to find that audience on cable TV. Same 15 months, same channels, Geo TV, Geo News, ARY Digital, Hum Europe, Hum News, New Vision TV, and Virgin Media shows zero impacts, every single month, for both the Pakistani and Indian samples. Not one of these channels is even on the platform. Which means that this isn’t viewers switching off or losing interest. There is simply nothing there to watch as none of these channels are carried on cable TV.
The timing doesn’t help the case for leaving it alone
If Virgin Media’s cable TV platform was a shrinking opportunity for this audience, you could at least understand the absence. But it isn’t shrinking. Pakistani viewing on Virgin Media actually held up better than on satellite over the same stretch, climbing from a mid-2025 dip in August 2025 to a high in December 2025, while satellite viewing for the same audience was falling. So the one platform treating this audience best right now is the one platform that isn’t showing them a single minute of their own language TV.
An audience that watches Pakistani TV channels on one platform and can’t find them on another isn’t a fading niche. It’s a gap. And it’s sitting in plain sight, on a platform that’s otherwise doing fine by that exact audience.
Compare that to how Indian programming is available. Sony, ZEE, Colors, Star, B4U, all carried on both Sky and Virgin. Even PTC Punjabi, a channel one would think would appeal to Pakistani Punjabi speakers too, sits at zero on Virgin. So this isn’t Pakistani channels being singled out over Indian ones, it’s a handful of big Indian entertainment brands that have locked down carriage everywhere, while Pakistani broadcasters (and a few smaller Indian ones) haven’t secured any of it on cable. Or maybe more accurately, haven’t been willing to pay for it.
Why the gap is still there, and it’s not really reluctance
From what I hear on both the platform and broadcaster side, Virgin Media isn’t the challenge here. They would probably carry these channels on the EPG if the numbers worked. The problem is price. Virgin’s carriage fees run considerably higher than Sky’s for an equivalent slot, and against the audience these channels currently pull, the broadcasters doing the maths keep landing on the same answer: it wouldn’t pay for itself. The ad revenue they could realistically pull from Virgin’s slice of the audience doesn’t cover what they’d owe just to be listed.
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And frankly that’s fair enough, if you are only looking one year at a time. But that’s exactly where If content is king, distribution is God saying comes in. You can’t build an audience on a platform where nobody can find you.The 1.97% satellite crossover, and Pakistani viewing holding steady on Virgin Media’s own cable numbers, both point the same way: the demand exists and isn’t going anywhere. But no channel converts that into a Virgin Media audience while it isn’t carried at all. Treat carriage as a cost you need to recover in year one, and you miss the point, distribution is what builds the audience the fee is supposed to be justified against, not the other way round.
This is actually costing the category!
▪ A proven cross community audience for Pakistani content on satellite has nowhere to go on cable.
▪ Pakistani viewership on Virgin Media is trending up, and there’s no channel there to catch it.
▪ Households that move from Sky to Virgin for price or bundling reasons lose Pakistani programming entirely, no substitute on offer.
▪ While this is happening against a backdrop where Indian viewing on Virgin overall dropped 69.8% between its February 2025 peak and its March 2026 low, a reminder that carriage alone doesn’t guarantee an audience. But not having it guarantees you get none.
None of this is a knock on the channels that have secured Virgin Media carriage, and it’s not an argument for charity carriage either. It’s an argument that both sides need to move. Virgin Media and broadcasters need pricing that reflects an audience actively proving itself, phased fees, launch rates, minimum guarantees tied to growth, rather than a full list price bet on an audience that can’t exist yet because the channel isn’t there to build it. If nobody moves, we will be looking at the exact same numbers a year from now. And honestly, that kind of standstill is what kills a category. Quietly, but quickly.
Data note: figures are BARB “Impacts (Reach/Weight)” covering the Digital Satellite (Sky) and Digital Cable (Virgin) platforms, “All Adults” Indian and Pakistani target audiences, January 2025 to March 2026 (15 months, with 2026 reflecting Q1 only).
About the author
Govind Shahi is a London based media and distribution consultant specialising in diaspora markets, international broadcast strategy and advertiser economics.
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