Peace TV launched from Dubai on January 21, 2006, an English-language satellite channel built around Zakir Naik's own comparative religion lectures and the question and answer sessions that had already made him a well known speaker at live events across South Asia and the Gulf. The format translated directly to television: long lecture segments followed by audience questions, delivered free to air so that anyone with a satellite dish, anywhere the signal reached, could watch without a subscription.
The channel expanded by language rather than by format. An Urdu version launched in 2009 to reach South Asian audiences more directly in their own language, followed by a Bangla channel on April 22, 2011 aimed specifically at Bengali-speaking viewers in Bangladesh and eastern India. A Chinese-language version followed in 2015, broadcasting for several years before its later closure. Each new language channel carried largely the same lecture-and-answer format that had defined the original English broadcast, extended to new audiences rather than reimagined for them.
By its own network's reported figures, Peace TV reached roughly 200 million viewers across more than 200 countries at its broadest extent, spanning Asia, Europe, Africa, Australia and North America on free-to-air satellite distribution. That reach, built from a single Dubai studio and one founder's lecture format, made Peace TV one of the most widely distributed religious broadcasting networks covered anywhere in this atlas, in the same category of scale as far older and more institutionally established broadcasters.