MAM
Asiaville, Sashi Kumar’s new digital venture launched
MUMBAI: Asiaville, a Multi-Lingual, Multimedia and Multi Platform digital media venture focused on producing original content across Indian languages is now live across digital media platforms. Backed by veteran media practitioner Sashi Kumar, Founder of Asianet and the Asian College of Journalism; and Tuhin Menon, Former President, Culture Machine, the company seeks to reimagine journalism for a new generation audience. Asiaville produces content in multimedia formats, with equal emphasis on Video, Audio and Text.
Asiaville has launched its websites and is across all social media platforms. The four language websites are: https://www.asiavillenews.com, https://hindi.asiavillenews.com, https://tamil.asiavillenews.com and https://malayalam.asiavillenews.com. Asiaville has offices in Chennai, Delhi and Kochi, with each office housing state-of-the-art integrated studio’s equipped to output multimedia content formats in short spans of time for a digital first audience. Live streaming will be a prominent feature of the Asiaville stable, helping redefine the concept of prime time on traditional media. With a strong focus on product and technology, Asiaville intends to leverage the latest advances in Machine Learning to deliver highly personalized content to end users across languages.
At the occasion, Asiaville also announced their associations with Twitter and IIT Madras. Asiaville is teaming up with Twitter on a series of Live streams in English, Hindi and Tamil in the run up to the 2019 general elections. Leveraging its strength in producing original content across languages, Asiaville will be conducting live discussions with Twitter influencers. The Tamil live streams will be hosted weekly on Fridays from Asiaville's studio in Chennai; and the English and Hindi bi-lingual livestream will be broadcast from its Delhi’s office on Wednesdays.
Asiaville is also working with researchers at IIT Madras to build out their machine learning capabilities, with the objective of targeting users across languages with a great degree of personalization. This tie-up would enable Asiaville to build personalized original content driven user feeds for each of the languages, part of its core mission to build product offerings around the core users taste profile.
Sashi Kumar, Chairman & Editor-in-Chief, Asiaville said “The news media today are at crossroads. They are facing new challenges – technological, political and commercial. There is a fatigue operating on the mainstream media which find themselves buffeted by the freewheeling social media on the one hand and the technology platforms purveying media on the other. It is therefore time to reimagine and reinvent journalism, particularly for the millennial who engages less and less with the legacy media. Asiaville, with its multimedia, hybrid heterodox approach, hopes to meet that growing demand of the near and medium term future.”
Online media consumption in India is going through a phase of tremendous growth. Digital and mobile devices are now the preferred medium of data consumption online. The smartphone market has seen unprecedented growth over the last 5 years, its penetration in India is expected to touch 470 million by the end of 2019. India currently has the second largest internet user base of 566 million in the world and is growing exponentially. Internet adoption in the country is now propelled by rural India which registered a 35% growth over the past year and is expected to reach 290 million users by the end of 2019.
According to Tuhin Menon, CEO, Asiaville, “With 9 out of 10 new internet users likely to be an Indian language user over the next five years, Asiaville seeks to address this burgeoning audience that is coming online through an innovative mix of original content formats that are native to digital platforms. We believe we have the right mix of original content expertise and product acumen to build a pan-Indian language network that is focused on the millennial. We are excited to have embarked on this journey and see great potential for scale and engagement with our digital first audience going forward”.
Asiaville’s ‘Journalism reimagined’ project leverages the new and emerging digital technology to provide better context, perspective and experiential understanding of the developments that inform and transform our times and our lives. It puts the millennial at the centre of its process of making meaning of our world. It is not about breaking news; it’s about fixing broken news. It is not about news as product; it’s about the process of news generation for the new generation.
Digital
Content India 2026 opens with a copro pitch, a spice evangelist and a £10,000 prize for Indian storytelling
Dish TV and C21Media’s three-day summit puts seven ambitious projects before an international jury, and two walk away with serious development money
MUMBAI: India’s content industry gathered in Mumbai this March for Content India 2026, a three-day summit organised by Dish TV in partnership with C21Media, and it wasted no time making a statement. The event opened with a Copro Pitch that put seven scripted and unscripted television concepts before an international panel of judges, and by the end of it, two projects had walked away with £10,000 each in marketing prize money from C21Media to support development and international promotion.
The jury, comprising Frank Spotnitz, Fiona Campbell, Rashmi Bajpai, Bal Samra and Rachel Glaister, evaluated a shortlist that ranged from a dark Mumbai comedy-drama about mental health (Dirty Minds, created by Sundar Aaron) to a Delhi coming-of-age mystery (Djinn Patrol, by Neha Sharma and Kilian Irwin), a techno-thriller about a teenage gaming prodigy (Kanpur X Satori, by Suchita Bhatia), an investigative crime drama blending mythology and modern thriller (The Age of Kali, by Shivani Bhatija), a documentary on India’s spice heritage (The Masala Quest, hosted by Sarina Kamini), a documentary on competitive gaming (Respawn: India’s Esports Revolution, by George Mangala Thomas and Sangram Mawari), and a reality-horror competition merging gaming and immersive fear (Scary Goose, by Samar Iqbal).
The session was hosted by Mayank Shekhar.
The two winners were Djinn Patrol, backed by Miura Kite, formerly of Participant Media and known for Chinatown and Keep Sweet: Pray & Obey, with Jaya Entertainment, producers of Real Kashmir Football Club, also attached; and The Masala Quest, created and hosted by Sarina Kamini, an Indian-Australian cook, author and self-described “spice evangelist.”
The summit also unveiled the Content India Trends Report, whose findings made for bracing reading. Daoud Jackson, senior analyst at OMDIA, set the tone: “By 2030, online video in India will nearly double the revenue of traditional TV, becoming the main driver of growth.” He noted that in 2025, India produced a quarter of all YouTube videos globally, overtaking the United States, while Indians collectively spend 117 years daily on YouTube and 72 years on Instagram. Traditional subscription TV is declining as free TV and connected TV gain ground, forcing broadcasters to innovate. “AI-generated content is just 2 per cent of engagement,” Jackson added, “highlighting the dominance of high-quality human content. The key for Indian media companies is scaling while monetising effectively from day one.”
Hannah Walsh, principal analyst at Ampere Analysis, added hard numbers to the picture. India produced over 24,000 titles in January 2026 alone, with 19,000 available internationally. The country now accounts for 12 per cent of Asia-Pacific content spend, up from 8 per cent in 2021, outpacing both Japan and China. Key exporters include JioStar, Zee Entertainment, Sony India, Amazon and Netflix, delivering over 7,500 Indian-produced titles abroad each year. The top importing markets are Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, the United States and the Philippines. Scripted content dominates globally at 88 per cent, with crime dramas and children’s and family titles performing particularly strongly.
Manoj Dobhal, chief executive and executive director of Dish TV India, framed the summit’s ambition squarely. “Stories don’t need translation. They need a platform, discovery, and reach, local or global,” he said. “India produces more movies than any country, our streaming platforms compete globally, and our tech and creators win international awards. Yet fragmentation slows growth. Producers, platforms, and tech move in different lanes. We need shared spaces, collaboration, and an ecosystem where ideas, technology, and people meet. That is why we built Content India.”
The data, the pitches and the prize money all pointed to the same conclusion: India is not waiting for the world to discover its stories. It is building the infrastructure to sell them.
