Where to Watch Pakistani Dramas in 2026: A Country-by-Country Guide

If you have a mom or an aunt in Karachi who keeps recommending shows, you have done the dance. She tells you to watch Tere Bin. You open Netflix. Not there. You check Prime Video. Not there. You search Hulu in case anyone licensed it (no one did). You end up watching half-resolution clips on YouTube uploaded by a fan account, or worse, you sit on a four-hour WhatsApp video call while someone in Lahore points her phone at the TV.

This is not a content problem. Pakistani dramas in 2026 are arguably in their strongest creative period in twenty years. It is a distribution problem, and the distribution problem is specifically a diaspora problem. Pakistan's own television market works fine. International rights are an afterthought, get sold late, get sold non-exclusively to whoever shows up, and get re-negotiated every few months. The result is the cleanest map I can draw of where Pakistani dramas actually live in 2026, from the perspective of someone who is not in Pakistan and just wants to watch the show.

The structural reason this is messy

Pakistani television runs on a handful of major networks: ARY Digital (and its sister channels), Hum TV, Geo Entertainment, Express Entertainment, ARY Zindagi, and a long tail of smaller players. Each network has its own streaming property or distribution partner. None of them coordinate.

Until ~2018, the de-facto archive of Pakistani dramas outside Pakistan was YouTube. The networks themselves uploaded full episodes, ad-monetized, with English subtitles, often within days of broadcast. That still works for a lot of older content. Then ARY launched ARY Plus as a paid OTT, Hum Network split their content across Hum TV's YouTube + a Hum-branded paid tier, and a third-party aggregator (Tapmad) started buying rights from multiple networks to bundle them for diaspora viewers. The result is four overlapping surfaces with different catalog depth, different country availability, different prices, and different gaps.

Add in OSN+ in the Gulf, which carries a rotating selection of Pakistani content for the MENA Pakistani diaspora, plus Indian-platform spillover (some ZEE5 and JioHotstar slates include Pakistani originals or co-productions), and you have a discovery problem that no single service can solve.

The platforms, and what each one is actually good for

Five surfaces genuinely matter for Pakistani drama outside Pakistan in 2026. Here is what each one does well and where it falls short.

ARY Plus (international subscription)

The canonical home for shows on the ARY family of networks: ARY Digital, ARY Zindagi, ARY Qtv. Same-day or next-day streams of currently airing dramas, full back-catalog of major hits, English subtitles on most current content. International tier costs around $7-10 USD/month depending on country, billed in local currency where supported. Available globally including US, UK, Canada, Australia, and most of the Gulf. The catalog is deep and current, but it's ARY-only, which means everything on Hum TV, Geo, and Express is missing.

Hum TV (YouTube and Hum Network paid tier)

Hum Network distributes most of its current dramas through its own YouTube channels (Hum TV, Hum Sitaray, Hum Pashto 1), with full episodes uploaded for free, ad-supported, often within hours of broadcast. English subtitles vary by show. A paid Hum Network subscription tier exists for ad-free + early-access access, with spotty availability outside Pakistan. For most diaspora viewers, the free YouTube path is what works. Catalog depth on YouTube is excellent for the past 5-7 years; older content rotates in and out depending on who controls the rights.

Tapmad

A Pakistani OTT targeted explicitly at the diaspora market. Carries content licensed from multiple networks (Hum, Geo, ARY at times, plus film and sports rights). Priced for international markets, around $5-8 USD/month. Available in US, UK, Canada, Australia, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and a growing list. The strength is breadth — Tapmad will often have a drama that's on no single network's own platform outside Pakistan. The weakness is licensing churn — shows come and go as deals renew. Don't assume a show available on Tapmad today will be there next year.

YouTube (the unofficial archive)

The real winner for older Pakistani content. Network-uploaded playlists go back a decade. Fan-uploaded re-cuts and full series exist for almost anything. The signal-to-noise problem is real: search results mix official uploads with fan uploads with reaction videos with random Pakistani news clips. But if a drama aired more than a couple years ago and isn't on ARY Plus or Tapmad, YouTube probably has it somewhere. Most network channels carry English subtitles on their official uploads, fan uploads often don't.

OSN+ (Gulf only)

The Pakistani diaspora in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and Oman has a unique advantage: OSN+ carries a rotating selection of Pakistani content alongside its Hollywood and Arabic catalogs. Selection is moderate, not exhaustive — usually a few currently-airing hits plus a back-catalog of recognized titles. If you're a Pakistani-content viewer already paying for OSN+ for the Hollywood side, the Pakistani slate is a nice bonus. If you're paying purely for Pakistani dramas, ARY Plus or Tapmad will give you a deeper catalog for less money.

Where you live changes everything

Here is roughly how the platform mix shakes out by region in 2026. Individual shows vary, but the pattern holds for most of the catalog.

Pakistan (the easy case)

ARY Plus, Hum TV, Geo TV, and Express are all available directly in Pakistan, usually with a free ad-supported tier and an optional paid upgrade. Most households pair one paid OTT with YouTube for backfill.

United States and Canada

Tapmad is the easiest single subscription. ARY Plus international tier works well for ARY-network shows. Hum TV's free YouTube uploads cover most current Hum content. JioHotstar and ZEE5 (both available in the US) occasionally carry Pakistani co-productions, but they are not the right primary subscription. The depth gap vs Pakistan itself is real, but the major current dramas are usually available within days of broadcast on at least one of these surfaces.

United Kingdom and Ireland

Same surfaces as the US — Tapmad, ARY Plus, Hum YouTube. UK-specific deals occasionally show up on Sky channels or Channel 4 for co-productions, but those are rare and not worth subscribing to a general UK package for Pakistani content alone.

Saudi Arabia, UAE, and the wider Gulf

Best market for Pakistani content outside Pakistan itself. ARY Plus and Tapmad are both available and aggressive in this region. OSN+ adds a meaningful Pakistani-content tier, often included in Pakistani-targeted bundles. Hum YouTube works as expected. For a Pakistani diaspora household in Riyadh or Dubai in 2026, a single ARY Plus subscription plus free Hum YouTube covers most of what you'd realistically want to watch.

Australia and New Zealand

Tapmad and ARY Plus international tier are the workable paid options. Hum YouTube is the free backbone. There is no Australia-native Pakistani-content service of any meaningful size.

Other regions (Europe non-UK, Southeast Asia, Africa)

Coverage thins out. ARY Plus and Tapmad both nominally support global subscriptions, but billing and payment-method support varies. Hum YouTube is the reliable constant. For very specific regions (Norway, South Africa, Indonesia), the path is often: search YouTube first, try Tapmad second, ARY Plus third, give up and WhatsApp your aunt fourth.

Why this is impossible to keep track of manually

Three things break manual tracking for Pakistani dramas specifically.

First, licensing windows are short and chaotic. Pakistani networks tend to sell international rights in 12-month or 24-month chunks. A drama on Tapmad today may move to a different platform when the rights renew, or simply disappear from international availability entirely. This is more pronounced than it is for, say, Indian content where major OTT deals tend to be longer.

Second, YouTube uploads get removed or copyright-claimed. A network might pull older content from its YouTube channel when it signs an exclusive OTT deal for that title. The episode you bookmarked last week may be gone next week. This makes YouTube great as a discovery surface but unreliable as a permanent archive.

Third, most aggregators don't index Pakistani content well. Try searching for "Tere Bin" on JustWatch. You will get TV listings from a different show with the same name, or nothing. The major Western aggregators were built for Western content, and their Pakistani indexes are thin where they exist at all.

Practical strategies that actually work

If you only want one paid subscription: ARY Plus international tier if you primarily watch ARY-network shows (most of the recent prestige dramas), Tapmad if you want breadth across networks.

If you want depth without paying twice: combine ARY Plus or Tapmad with Hum TV's free YouTube uploads. That covers the three biggest networks (ARY, Tapmad-licensed, Hum) for $5-10/month total.

For currently airing dramas: ARY Plus for ARY shows (same-day), Hum YouTube for Hum shows (often same-day, sometimes a few hours delay), Tapmad for the rest. Geo dramas are inconsistently available internationally — sometimes they show up on Tapmad, sometimes they don't.

For older or hard-to-find titles: YouTube network-channel deep search, then YouTube fan-upload search, then give up and accept that a chunk of older Pakistani TV is genuinely not licensed for diaspora streaming and never will be.

For Gulf diaspora households: ARY Plus + OSN+ is the most-content-for-the-money combination if you already need OSN+ for Hollywood content. Pure-Pakistani households can skip OSN+.

How OTTASIA fits in

I built OTTASIA because I was doing the five-app dance myself for Indian and Pakistani content, and figured every desi diaspora household must be doing the same thing. Free, independent, no signup required to use the discovery features.

Specifically for Pakistani content:

• ARY Plus is deep-linked properly with current catalog data refreshed nightly. Search any ARY drama and we point you straight at the ARY Plus title page, not a generic search.
• Hum and Geo content surfaces via TMDB + YouTube cross-reference where available. The data is thinner than ARY but improving each month.
• Country-aware always. If you're in Karachi we show the Pakistan-tier subscription URLs. If you're in Toronto we show the international tier URLs. If you're in Riyadh we surface OSN+ alongside.
• Save shows you want to watch and get an email alert when they land on any major service in your country — useful for the licensing-windows-shift problem above. Try the Pakistan browse page to see what's currently surfacing.

OTTASIA covers 30 Asian markets including Pakistan, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, India, and the wider South Asian diaspora markets. Country-aware from day one, not as an afterthought.

Closing

Pakistani drama distribution in 2026 is fragmented because Pakistani television was built for a domestic market first and international distribution second. That is unlikely to change. The right tool for diaspora viewers in 2026 is not a single perfect subscription, it is a way to figure out which combination of services makes sense for the specific shows you actually care about — and a way to be notified when one of those shows shows up somewhere new in your country.

If you spot a Pakistani drama mis-listed on OTTASIA for your country, or know about a regional platform we're missing (especially for the Gulf or Canada), email me at hello@ottasia.com. Pakistani content data is one of the areas where user feedback is most valuable — the major aggregators don't index it well, so we're building this index largely from first-party signal.

OTTASIA is a free, independent project. Built solo, no venture capital, no ads, no data harvesting. If you found this useful, the best thing you can do is share it with one other diaspora viewer who does the WhatsApp screen-share dance.