Zee Telefilms Ltd
The country's largest vertically integrated media company Zee Telefilms Ltd can term 2005 as a year when its hopes got dashed (as the Supreme Court ruled against its petition challenging the Indian cricket boss' diktats) and rekindled as towards the end of the year a new regime took over the Indian cricket board and promptly handed Zee the rights for the India-Sri Lanka Test series.
Considering that the group's promoter Subhash Chandra is bullish on cricket and his sports channel, late developments augur well for the group.
And, then the predictably unpredictable Chandra relinquished the position of managing director deciding to continue as the non-executive chairman and principal promoter of Zee Telefilms. Who'll fill the MD's vacant slot? A good question for which nobody has an immediate answer except guesses like CEO Pradeep Guha who might be elevated to the vacant position.
The high profile Guha joined as the CEO of Zee Tele from Bennett, Coleman & Co, publishers of The Times of India.
While Chandra re-entered the FM radio race through Essel Group company Pan India Network Infravest, he also hived off the news business into a separate company, Zee News Pvt Ltd with scaled down the foreign holding to comply with government norms.
In the restructured news entity, Zee Telefilms' equity stake is 35 per cent, which works out under a complex formula to about 20 per cent of foreign holding on a pro rata basis.
ZTL also restructured its top management. The most crucial was the change at the top for flagship channel Zee TV. Puneet Goenka, who had been overseeing the operations of Zee Sports, was made Zee TV business head, while outgoing Zee TV business head Abhijit Saxena returned to the arena where he first made a mark, the distribution business. Saxena also supervises special projects for Zee TV.
After almost 13 years of existence, the Zee Network decided to sport a new look, which also included renaming of the three English channels. Zee English, ZMZ and MX were re-named as Zee Caf, Zee Studios and Zee Select, respectively. Comedy channel Smile TV became Zee Smile and Trendz got re-christened as Zee Trendz. All channels under the Alpha brand were brought under the Zee brand. The company's lone south Indian presence, Zee Telugu, got relaunched in May 2005.
With game shows being the flavour of the year, Zee TV launched the Rs 30 million Kam ya Zyaada in the last leg of the calendar year with actor Manoj Bajpai as an anchor.
Programming-wise, the channel attempted a variety of genres this year. Sinndoor Tere Naam Ka and a consistent Tumhari Disha have helped the channel to strengthen the 7:30 pm - 8 pm time band. 2005 also saw Zee TV increasing its production and promotion budgets manifold.
On the international front, Zee Arabiya, a music and lifestyle channel for the youth, was launched. This was Zee's first localised channel offering in the Middle East. Zee has commited to invest around Rs 1.2 billion in the region within a year.
Source: Indiantelevision.com
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