Alisha Coelho named AVoD business head at Zee5

MUMBAI: Few executives can claim to have been present at the birth of not one but three of Asia’s biggest streaming platforms. Alisha Coelho can. She has just stepped up to lead AVoD business at Zee5, taking charge of Free5, the advertisement-led universe of free movies, series, micro dramas and live channels that the platform is betting on to widen its funnel well beyond subscribers.

The promotion caps four years at Zee5, where Coelho has steadily climbed from senior vice president content, India, to senior vice president content across India and global markets, and now to business head. Along the way she has run movie and series acquisitions worth tens of millions of dollars, overseen content pipelines processing millions of assets annually across localisation, subtitling and dubbing, and pushed data-driven merchandising and AI-led discovery tools into the platform’s product stack. That is a formidable operational base for anyone taking on a business head mandate.

What makes the appointment particularly interesting is the road that got her here. Coelho spent three years at Warner Bros. Discovery, first as content lead for discovery+ India, where she helped launch the service from scratch, then as associate director overseeing content ingest and programming across discovery+ APAC and local affiliates including JioFiber and Amazon Prime Video Channels, a role that involved evaluating content acquisitions worth millions of dollars for Asia. Before that came a stint at the National Basketball Association managing localised content production, including Hoop Nation, a four-part musical documentary that won gold in the branded content category at the PROMAX 2020 awards.

And before any of that, there was Hotstar. Coelho was on the platform’s launch team as senior digital producer, then rose to programming lead for premium entertainment and news, driving the acquisition of over 6,000 hours of English entertainment and film content worth millions of dollars from HBO, Disney, Fox, Showtime and others, while also overseeing the launch of Hotstar’s news vertical with Republic, Fox and Sky News as anchor partners. Three platform launches, one executive. That is not a résumé line, that is a pattern.

Her earlier life as a journalist, with bylines at the Economic Times, afaqs!, The Wire, Mid Day and Indiatimes.com, including three years reporting on public healthcare for Mid Day, gives her content instincts an unusually reported-out foundation. Storytelling first, streaming strategy second, and now, business leadership third.