Subhash Chandra, the Indian media pioneer behind the Zee TV channel, is making a $250m bet that he can get American viewers and advertisers interested in Indian-style alternative therapies and "wellness" programming.

The investment will go towards original and acquired programmes for Veria Living, a US cable and satellite channel and website focused on yoga, holistic treatments and healthy eating, and represents the largest such investment by an Indian media group in content for the US market, he said.

Mr Chandra, the Essel Group chairman who began his entertainment career more than 20 years ago with one Mumbai amusement park, is using his family's money, rather than the budget of Zee TV, which is 51 per cent family-controlled. He launched the Veria channel in 2010 with a $100m investment.

Part of the new funds will be used to rebrand the channel from Veria to Veria Living to help explain its positioning more clearly to US viewers.

"This is the only health and wellness channel in the US," said Mr Chandra, who practices Vipassana meditation. "This country [the US] produces about 25,000 masters degree holders every year in Ayurvedha [traditional Indian medicine]. They will get a voice, as will the tens of thousands of practitioners in the US."

Veria has had trouble persuading the largest US cable operators, including Comcast and Time Warner Cable, to carry the channel, however, which is now available through Dish, Verizon FiOS and Frontier Communications in just 10m of the 80m US TV homes. Mr Chandra said he hoped to be in 35m-40m US homes by the end of 2012.

"Big cable companies were not as receptive as we would have expected," Mr Chandra said, but Veria was now talking to "all the big cable operators" and to newer digital distributors. Online channels, from YouTube to Hulu, have begun to provide a more viable home for specialist programming, from cricket games for Americans of Indian extraction to documentary films that struggle to get cable distribution.

Extra distribution will be critical for Veria to get the Nielsen ratings advertisers demand and to reach Mr Chandra's goal of the channel breaking even within 24 months.

Mr Chandra's bet on the US market comes at a time when growth in Indian cable TV has slowed. Although no longer growing at 30-35 per cent per year, at 14-15 per cent it still exceeds the growth in US pay-TV and continues to attract investment from large US media groups. India has the world's third-largest number of homes with pay television, at about 100m, serviced by more than 450 channels.

Groups including Disney, NBC, Time Warner, and Viacom have committed several billion dollars to India's entertainment industry over the past two years.

Mr Chandra said the multitude of competitors in India's television market were losing a combined $3bn a year, making Zee TV "one of a handful" of profitable operators.

Margins across the Indian pay-TV market are among the lowest of any emerging market because of rising costs, competition and reliance on legacy analogue networks.

These losses would force the industry to consolidate, Mr Chandra predicted, saying that this "cleaning up" would bring annual growth back to the 30-35 per cent rate within three to five years.

KPMG India expects the number of TV households in Asia's third-largest economy to exceed 156m by 2015. India is also expected to overtake China as the largest pay-TV advertising market in Asia by 2017 with $5.6bn in net revenues, according to Media Partners Asia.