MAM
Elite Pro Basketball League’s CEO Sunny Bhandarkar buys a team ‘Emerging Elite’ in Street Ball League owned by Rannvijay Singha and Harman Singha
MUMBAI: Elite Pro Basketball League CEO Sunny Bhandarkar, CMO Kaustubh Ghare, COO Pranav Prabhu and operations head Bharat Singh have bought a team in the Street Ball League owned by Rannvijay Singha and Harman Singha. Street Ball League is a one of its kind 3v3 semi-pro basketball league in India where streets meet basketball. The main aim behind buying the team is to promote the sport of Basketball in India.
‘Emerging Elite’ is the newest entrant in the league which will kick start its journey in the third season in Mumbai from 8 October 2022. The ‘Emerging Elite’ Team will include Abhyudaya Yadav, Abhishek Rathee, Abhishek Tyagi, Sidhant Shinde, Ajinkya Mane and Arvind Arumugam. Out of the six players Abhishek Tyagi, Abhishek Rathee and Abhyudaya Yadav recently represented India as Delhi Storms at the recently concluded Red Bull Half Court World Final in Egypt. Though the team went down by two points in the pre-quarters fighting Greece it gave them a lot of exposure.
Bhandarkar said, “We are really happy to buy a team in the upcoming Street Ball League. The main aim behind this move is to promote the game of Basketball in India. We believe we have a lot of potential and would love to see India qualify for the Olympics shortly and compete with the best athletes globally.”
Elite Pro Basketball League CMO Kaustubh Ghare said, “We are sure initiatives like these will help to grow Basketball in India and we want to play a crucial part in uplifting the game in India. We are also proud of Delhi Storms who played well and went down fighting to Greece which is far superior at the moment when it comes to the game as compared to us.”
Elite Pro Basketball League India’s first-of-its-kind 5×5 Pro Basketball League recently announced that they were going to organise two wildcards tryouts in Chennai and Delhi and they have received over 1200 athlete registrations. Elite Pro Basketball League which will kick start its first season early next year will feature 12 teams and has already signed over 140 athletes to play in various teams.
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Abhay Duggal joins JioStar as director of Hindi GEC ad sales
The streaming giant brings in a seasoned revenue hand as the battle for Hindi television advertising heats up
MUMBAI: Abhay Duggal has a new desk, and JioStar has a new weapon. The media and entertainment veteran has joined JioStar as director of entertainment ad sales for Hindi general entertainment channels, adding 17 years of hard-won revenue experience to one of India’s most powerful broadcasting operations.
Duggal is no stranger to big portfolios or bruising markets. Before joining JioStar, he spent a brief stint at Republic World as deputy general manager and north regional head for ad sales. Before that, he put in three years at Enterr10 Television, where he ran the north region for Dangal TV and Dangal 2, two of India’s leading free-to-air Hindi channels. The north alone accounted for more than 50 per cent of total channel revenue on his watch, a number that tends to get attention in any sales meeting.
His longest stint was at Zee Entertainment Enterprises, where he spent over six years rising to associate director of sales. There he commanded the Hindi movies cluster across seven channels, owned more than half of north India’s revenue across flagship properties including Zee TV and &TV, and closed marquee sponsorships across the Indian Premier League, Zee Rishtey Awards and Dance India Dance. He also handled monetisation for the English movies and entertainment cluster and the global news channel WION, a portfolio that would stretch most sales teams twice his size.
Earlier in his career Duggal closed what was then a Rs 3 crore single deal at Reliance Broadcast Network, one of the largest in Indian radio at the time, before that he helped launch and monetise JAINHITS, India’s first HITS-based cable and satellite platform.
His edge, by his own account, lies in marrying data and instinct: translating audience trends, inventory signals and client demands into long-term partnerships built on cost-per-rating-point discipline rather than short-term deal chasing. In a media landscape being reshaped by streaming, fragmented attention and AI-driven advertising, that kind of rigour is increasingly rare and increasingly valuable.
JioStar, which blends the scale of Reliance’s Jio platform with the content firepower of Star, is doubling down on its advertising business at precisely the moment the Hindi GEC market is getting more competitive. Bringing in someone who has spent nearly two decades doing exactly this, across some of India’s most watched channels, is a pointed statement of intent. Duggal has spent his career turning audiences into revenue. JioStar is clearly betting he can do it again, and bigger.
