How we checked SLBC Tamil National Service
Everything published about this station was read from the station's own website or its own stream, and every fact below names the page it came from and the year it was read. We changed 2 things about this entry. We also found 4 things we could have published and decided not to.
What we publish, and where each part came from
| What we say | Read from | When |
|---|---|---|
|
Description
This is the Tamil National Service of the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, which its own site lists among its radio channels as "Thamil Sevai" in English and calls දමිළ ස්වදේශීය සේවය in Sinhala. Its own page sets out a vision and a mission specific to the service, about broadcasting programmes of high quality across varied fields that bring out social and cultural value for listeners' enjoyment. The page then gives the service's history and describes its present output: programmes on national integration and reconciliation, national commemorations, and material across education, social affairs, culture, economics, politics, medicine, sport and music. Christian devotional content runs daily, with Catholic and Christian programmes and songs on Sundays and Thursdays.
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Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, self-styled on the page as SRI LANKA BRODCASTING CORPORATION | 2026 |
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Artists
none established. The page publishes no playlist or song history.
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Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, self-styled on the page as SRI LANKA BRODCASTING CORPORATION | 2026 |
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Contact route
The parent broadcaster's routes, which are where the channel sends listeners. SLBC's own Contact Us page and the footer of the Tamil service's page both carry the corporation's postal address in Colombo, two telephone number ranges, and an email address on the slbcmail.lk domain. The service publishes no separate studio line, request line or social account of its own.
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Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, self-styled on the page as SRI LANKA BRODCASTING CORPORATION | 2026 |
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Contact page
https://www.slbc.lk/contact-us
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Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, self-styled on the page as SRI LANKA BRODCASTING CORPORATION | 2026 |
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Era
Not the point; this is a speech-led national service.
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Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, self-styled on the page as SRI LANKA BRODCASTING CORPORATION | 2026 |
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Music
Full service public speech radio: news, national affairs, religious devotion, education, culture, economics, politics, health and sport, with music.
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Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, self-styled on the page as SRI LANKA BRODCASTING CORPORATION | 2026 |
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Language
Tamil. The service is SLBC's Tamil-language national channel; its own page describes Tamil programming, Tamil children's programming and Tamil ball by ball cricket commentary, and the live stream SLBC publishes on that page is mounted as "Tnsstream" and identifies itself as "Tamil National". Note that the page describing the service is itself written in Sinhala.
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Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, self-styled on the page as SRI LANKA BRODCASTING CORPORATION | 2026 |
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Kind
A network channel of a state broadcaster, carrying its own produced output plus at least one relay of an outside service, the BBC Sandeshaya programme. Its stream is live and served from SLBC's own Icecast 2.4.2 server at 128 kbps stereo.
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Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, self-styled on the page as SRI LANKA BRODCASTING CORPORATION | 2026 |
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Worth knowing
The service's own page dates its first broadcast precisely, to the airing on 1936-10-09 of the play "රාම වනවාසම්" staged by the Vidya Vinoda Sabha, and says Tamil children's programmes began that same year under the name "පාට්ටි". It records that the Tamil National and Tamil Commercial services were founded on 1951-04-01, merged from December 1984, and separated again from 1996-01-09.
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Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, self-styled on the page as SRI LANKA BRODCASTING CORPORATION | 2026 |
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Where
Sri Lanka. SLBC's corporate address, printed in the footer of the service's own page, is in Colombo 07. The page states that from 2010-01-06 the Palali transmitting station was opened and all of SLBC's Tamil services were distributed from there. No frequency figure for the service is published on the page.
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Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, self-styled on the page as SRI LANKA BRODCASTING CORPORATION | 2026 |
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On air
none. The service's own page names nobody on air. I checked the Thamil Sevai page in full, SLBC's Contact Us page, and the sibling Thendral FM channel page, which is empty apart from header and footer.
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Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, self-styled on the page as SRI LANKA BRODCASTING CORPORATION | 2026 |
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Programmes
The page names no current programme titles with airtimes. What it describes in the present tense is a daily Christian devotional strand, Catholic and Christian programmes and songs on Sundays and Thursdays, special Christmas programming around the Madhu Matha and Thalawila Puttalam festivals, New Year church services, and a relay of the BBC's සංදේශය (Sandeshaya) which it says resumed on the Sinhala National and Tamil services from 2010-04-15.
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Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, self-styled on the page as SRI LANKA BRODCASTING CORPORATION | 2026 |
What we corrected
Each of these changed a field in our own entry. The reasoning is the researcher's own, recorded when the change was made.
| Field | Change | Why |
|---|---|---|
| homepage url | https://radiosindia.com/slbctamil.html → https://www.slbc.lk/world-heritage-sites/thamil-sevai | The stored address was a page on radiosindia.com, a directory, which this catalogue does not accept; I did not read it. The Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation's own site is live at slbc.lk and lists its radio channels in its own navigation, where the Tamil service appears as Thamil Sevai and links to this page. The page is the service's own: it carries a vision and mission written for this service (I checked, and that text appears on no other page of the site, not on the corporate Overview or Background pages and not on the sibling Thendral FM page, which is empty apart from header and footer), followed by the service's own history and a description of its present output. The page also publishes the service's live stream at http://220.247.227.6:8000/Tnsstream, and that server's own metadata returns icy-name 'Tamil National', which ties this page to this row. The odd /world-heritage-sites/ path segment is a CMS section slug the site reuses for all of its channel pages; the address is on SLBC's own domain and does not redirect. |
| language code |
ta
what it said before was not recorded; the
reasoning usually states it
|
Tamil. SLBC's own channel page for this service, at slbc.lk/world-heritage-sites/thamil-sevai, describes it as the දමිළ ස්වදේශීය සේවය, the Tamil national service, and recounts Tamil programming throughout: Tamil children's programmes from 1936 under the name පාට්ටි, airtime allocated for Tamil listeners, the Tamil national and Tamil commercial services founded in 1951, and ball-by-ball cricket commentary broadcast දෙමළ බසින්, in the Tamil language. The service's own live stream, published on that page, is mounted as Tnsstream and its server reports icy-name 'Tamil National'. One caution recorded for the log: the page describing the service is itself written in Sinhala, which is SLBC's house language for its site, not the language of this channel's broadcasts, so si would be the wrong reading of the same page. |
What we found and did not publish
Material that would have made this page fuller, and was refused. A page with five named presenters looks better than a page with none even when the five are a website theme's demonstration content, and the difference is invisible to a reader. So it is recorded here instead.
| What we could have said | Why we did not |
|---|---|
| The founding dates, launch histories and regional detail of Thendral FM (2001-01-14), Pirei FM (2005-11-04), the Jaffna and Palali regional service and the separate Tamil Commercial Service, all of which appear in the same paragraphs on this page | Those are other SLBC channels, each with its own entry in the site's own channel list, and this row is the Tamil National Service alone. Attributing their launches or their output here is exactly the network bleed the row was flagged for.
source |
| The airtimes "අඟහරුවාදා, බ්රහස්පතින්දා සහ සෙනසුරාදා ... පස්වරු 5.00 සිට 5.30", Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays from 5.00pm to 5.30pm, and the four hour Tamil allocation that follows it | Both are historical, dated on the page itself to 1940-04-01 and 1950-01-01. They are not a current schedule.
source |
| A correction of the title to the site's own English label "Thamil Sevai" | The stored title is accurate and identifies both the broadcaster and the channel, and the operator's own stream calls the service "Tamil National", so renaming was not necessary. I also did not adopt the site's own heading, which misspells its name as "SRI LANKA BRODCASTING CORPORATION".
source |
| The stored homepage's content | radiosindia.com is a directory, which this catalogue does not accept, so I read nothing from it and propose SLBC's own Tamil service page instead. NOTE ON BINDING: the row is bound beyond doubt. SLBC publishes the service's stream on this page at http://220.247.227.6:8000/Tnsstream, and the stream server's own metadata returns icy-name "Tamil National". The mount abbreviation and the server's own station name both match the stored title. If the catalogue holds no stream_url for this row, that address is the operator's own.
source |
If you think something here is wrong
Tell us which fact and what you found instead. Everything above names its source and its date, so a disagreement can be settled by looking rather than argued. Where another site disagrees with us, it is usually because it is repeating a radio directory, and occasionally because we got it wrong. We would like to know which.
Read from the station's own material; this page is generated from the
catalogue as it stands now, so it changes when the research does. Research
current as at 2026.
This entry began as: SLBC Tamil National Service — listed via Radio Browser · https://radiosindia.com/slbctamil.html