iWorld
Arré Launches Arré Studio, ropes in veteran film-maker and ad-film man Harsh Dave
MUMBAI: In a little over two years of launch, Arré has created multiple fiction and reality show franchises and properties such as the hugely popular A.I.SHA My Virtual Girlfriend, Official Chukyagiri, Official CEOgiri, The Real High, I Don’t Watch TV, The Adventures of Abbaas Mastan, Arré Ho Ja Re-gender, This Week in Food, The Farm Life, which have won accolades globally at festivals such as the Webbys, LA Web Fest and the South Florida Web Festival.
Furthering its original content play, Arré will now see the launch of some very large-scale shows and films in partnership with OTT platforms and broadcast television, across languages and genres, in addition to its repertoire on its own platform. The Studio is putting together a team comprising of domestic and international talent to help build creative scale and collaborate with the best across the world.
Veteran film-maker and ad-man Harsh Dave has joined Arré for its Studio venture as Executive Producer. Harsh will strengthen Arré Studio’s development and execution capabilities in the original content space.
Harsh has been a production veteran and has a wide body of work across television, feature film production and advertising, spanning over two decades. He has produced popular television showssuch as Uttaran, Tumhari Disha and Rakhi and has been involved inthe line production of international feature films such as The Other End of the Line, Basmati Blues, and The Man Who Knew Infinity. Harsh’s advertising work includes producing commercials for a variety of global companies such as P&G, Unilever, PepsiCo, Renault, Hero, Samsung, and Diageo.
The original content market in India is expected to be a multi-billion-dollar opportunity. Indian and international OTT platforms have acknowledged original programming as the driving force for growth of subscribers and viewers. Broadcast television too, is looking for new idioms in entertainment programming. Arré is aiming to be a significant player in this space.
Sanjay Ray Chaudhuri, Co-Founder and Creative Head, Arré, said, “We’re hugely excited about our Studio projects, which I believe could be breaking new ground in the original content space in India. We’re looking to put together a varied and exceptional talent pool for the venture, and I’m delighted to have Harsh join our team.”
Ajay Chacko, Co-Founder and CEO, Arré, said, “Harsh brings with him tremendous amounts of experience and creative energy. His repertoire is fairly diverse and spans interesting work across TV, Bollywood, Hollywood and advertising. With him on board Arré Studio, we hope to double our efforts to bring high-quality entertainment to Indian and international audiences.”
Harsh Dave said, “Arré has been quite cutting edge with respect to its originals slate on its platform and I’m excited about the next slate of projects which are bigger and better. We aim to become the country’s foremost studio in quality original programming and I’m delighted to be part of this journey.”
Gaming
India’s broadcasters say no to Fifa World Cup 2026
Fifa has slashed its asking price by 65 per cent but India’s broadcasters are still not buying
MUMBAI: The world’s biggest sporting event cannot find a single taker in the world’s most sports-mad nation. Fifa’s television rights for the 2026 World Cup remain unsold in India, and the clock is ticking loudly.
To shift the property, world football’s governing body has already swallowed hard and cut its asking price from $100m to $35m, bundling in the 2030 edition as a sweetener. It has not worked. Indian broadcasters have looked at the offer, done the sums and quietly walked away.
The reasons are brutally simple. The 2026 tournament, co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico, kicks off in a time zone that turns India’s primetime into a graveyard shift. Most matches will air between midnight and 7am IST, a scheduling catastrophe for advertisers chasing mass reach. The 2022 Qatar edition was a gift by comparison, with matches dropping neatly into Indian evenings. North America offers no such luxury.
The market itself has also changed beyond recognition. The merger of Star India and Viacom18 into JioStar has gutted the competitive tension that once sent sports rights prices soaring. Where rival bidders once slugged it out, there is now a single dominant buyer, and it is in no hurry. JioStar has valued the rights at roughly $25m, a full $10m below Fifa’s already-discounted floor price. That gap has so far proved unbridgeable.
Broadcasters are also nursing a ferocious cricket hangover. Between 2022 and 2023, Indian media houses committed well over $10bn to cricket rights alone, covering IPL, ICC events and BCCI domestic fixtures combined. After a binge of that scale, appetite for a football package that delivers a fraction of the ratings, in the dead of night, is close to zero.
The economics of football broadcasting make the maths even harder. Cricket, with its natural breaks every few overs, is an advertiser’s paradise. Football offers a 15-minute halftime and precious little else. Recovering a nine-figure rights fee from a single half-hour ad window is a stretch at the best of times. These are not the best of times: the Indian government’s tightening grip on real-money gaming and gambling advertising has vaporised a category that once underwrote the economics of big sporting events.
Nor is the World Cup an anomaly. Indian Super League valuations have cratered. English Premier League rights have softened across successive cycles. The cooling of football as a broadcast commodity in India is structural, not cyclical.
With the tournament opening on 11th June, Fifa is running out of road. It may yet blink and meet JioStar at $25m. Or it may go direct, streaming the entire tournament on its own platform, Fifa+, or cutting a digital deal with YouTube, and hoping that a generation of Indian football fans finds its way there without a broadcaster to guide them.
Either way, the beautiful game’s Indian chapter is looking decidedly ugly.
