ABP News is an Indian Hindi news channel owned by the ABP Group. It was formerly known as STAR News before being acquired by the ABP Group. ABP Live is an Indian English news website owned by the ABP Group.
History[]
STAR News was launched on February 18, 1998. On 2003, STAR News became it's own channel. It was the first bilingual news service and was initially run by STAR India on its own with NDTV doing the production until 2003. When the agreement with the NDTV expired in 2003, STAR News was transformed into a complete Hindi language news channel, part of the STAR and ABP tie-up.
In 2003, the contract with NDTV ended, and STAR decided to run the channel on its own. However, the government introduced a guideline capping foreign equity in the News business to 26%. STAR then entered into a joint venture with the Ananda Bazar Patrika group to form a company called Media Content and Communications Services Pvt. Ltd. (MCCS) which ran the channel STAR News. STAR owned 26% in this joint venture while the Ananda Bazar Patrika group owned 74%.
On 16 April 2012, Anandabazar Patrika (ABP) Group announced that they would part ways, allowing the Murdoch-controlled company to retreat from the news business in India to focus on entertainment. With the split, the eight-year affiliation with the 'Star' brand came to an end. Media Content and Communications (MCCS), the company that owned and operated the news channels, said that after the split, Hindi news channel Star News would be named ABP News, Bengali news channel Star Ananda would become ABP Ananda and the Marathi news channel Star Majha would be called ABP Majha. A Punjabi language version of the channel called ABP Sanjha is popular with northern Punjabi audiences. A Gujarati language version called ABP Asmita was launched on 1 January 2016.
In November 2016, Avinash Pandey became the CEO of ABP News Network.
