Republic TV joins News Broadcasters Association

Four months after its launch, Arnab Goswami's news venture Republic TV has joined the News Broadcasters Association (NBA), the industry lobby group for news channels in India. 

Commenting on the development, Vikas Khanchandani, CEO, Republic TV stressed on the need to democratise the NBA with wider representation and voice from the various regional news players. He added, "We are looking forward to playing an instrumental role to make it an inclusive body. There is a need and opportunity to expand the canvas in light of ever increasing consumption of news content over the web."

It may be recalled that at the time of Republic TV's launch in May this year, NBA had written to the Broadcast Audience Research Council of India (BARC) asking them not to release Republic TV’s debut week ratings and had alleged that the channel was using multiple logical channel numbers (LCNs) with the intention of increasing its feed. When BARC went ahead and released the data for that week, English news channels that are members of the NBA strongly protested the move by opting out of BARC and removing the BARC watermark from their feeds. 

With this latest development, Republic TV now becomes a part of the committee which has members from NDTV, Zee News, Times Television Network, Network18 Group and India Today Television.