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Television In IndiaA huge industry by itself, the Indian silver screen has thousands of programmes in all the states of India. The small screen has produced numerous celebrities of their own kind some even attaining national fame. Though the most prominent TV channels are Hindi, there are numerous channels in Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and so on. TV soaps are extremely popular with housewives as well as working women. Some small time actors have made it big in Bollywood. History Indian small screen programming started off in the early 1980s. At that time there was only one national channel Doordarshan, which was government owned. The Ramayana and Mahabharat was the first major television series produced. This serial notched up the world record in viewer ship numbers for a single program. By the late 1980s more and more people started to own television sets. Though there was a single channel, television programming had reached saturation. Hence the government opened up another channel which had part national programming and part regional. This channel was known as DD 2 later DD Metro. Both channels were broadcasted terrestrially. Cable Television In 1992, the government liberated its markets, opening them up to cable television. Five new channels belonging to the Hong Kong based Star TV gave Indians a fresh breath of life. MTV, Star Plus, BBC, Prime Sports and Chinese Channel were the 5 channels. Zee TV was the first private owned Indian channel to broadcast over cable. A few years later CNN, Discovery Channel, National Geographic Channel made its foray into India. Star expanded its bouquet introducing Star World, Star Sports, ESPN and Star Gold. Regional channels flourished along with a multitude of Hindi channels and a few English channels. By 2001 HBO and History Channel were the other international channels to enter India. In 2003 news channels started to boom. Today there are 20 news channels. Also see List of TV channels in India and List of Indian television stations
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