MTA International

The idea of a medium for the live broadcasting of media in the Ahmadiyya community takes its root in March 1989 when the community in Mauritius, followed by the community in Germany would dial the Fazl Mosque in London to listen to the caliph's Friday sermon over a telephone call. The sermon would be listened on loudspeakers of the mosques in the respective countries. This encouraged the communities of other countries to also dial in every Friday, overwhelming phone lines.

Initial Launch

This led to the inception of Ahmadiyya Muslim Presentation (AMP) in August 1992 which would broadcast the weekly Friday sermons, and in 1993, the first Jalsa Salana to be broadcast live. This became the first TV channel run by the Ahmadiyya Muslim community as well as the first TV channel to broadcast Islamic programmes globally. Initially, the studio and video library shared a 10 by 10 ft (3.0 by 3.0 m) room in the Mahmood Hall of Fazl Mosque equipped with a single video camera and "few ordinary flood lights". The programming for AMP gradually increased until 7 January 1994, when AMP was rebranded to MTA and increased its daily broadcasting hours from four to 12 hours, and in April 1996, to 24 hours.

In 2005, MTA began its live online broadcast and recorded the Jalsa Salana in High-definition video.

MTA 3 Al-Arabiya

On 23 March 2007. MTA 3 Al-Arabiya was launched, which was an entirely Arabic channel, primarily for viewers of the Middle East.

MTA Africa

On 1 August 2016, MTA Africa 1 and 2 were inaugurated by Mirza Masroor Ahmad, broadcasting programmes in African languages as well as programmes from MTA 1. In September 2024, MTA Africa became a member of the African Union of Broadcasting after having applied in 2022.

2020 era

From 27 May 2020, known as Khilafat Day for Ahmadis, MTA rearranged its channels according to regions and introduced new channels. These new channels were formerly MTA1 broadcasting on different satellites, converted to cater viewers of specific regions by broadcasting programmes in specific languages for each region. MTA 1 on Galaxy 19 became MTA8 HD AMERICA with programmes in Urdu, English, French and Spanish.

MTA has introduced a number of apps for the benefit of their viewers across a variety of platforms on all devices such as TV, Phone, Tablets, Desktops etc. The network also makes use of social media to live stream their channels on websites such as Facebook and Twitter as well as YouTube to broadcast all four channels, live.

In addition, as MTA International operates globally and in many different countries, many countries (where Ahmadiyya may have a significant or even minor presence) have their own official MTA YouTube channel for their specific region or language, which allows them to stream regional events that may not be broadcast on MTA but may be streamed on YouTube such as Jalsa Salana Canada was streamed on the YouTube channel MTA Canada, as well as this, it allows specific countries to stream live translations for key programmes such as the Friday Sermon.

There are also applications for mobile and personal devices on a variety of platform such as Roku TV, Apple TV, Android and iOS. On 2 August (at Jalsa Salana UK 2019), a range of MTA applications were launched for Smart TV brands such as Samsung, Android TV, Amazon Fire TV, Panasonic, LG, Sony and Philips.