MAM
Bradshaw Capital acquires Elite Pro Basketball League franchise Jaipur Giants
Mumbai: Bradshaw Capital has acquired the Jaipur Giants franchise of the Elite Pro Basketball League. Bradshaw Capital is led by former Montblanc US CEO Bill Brown. Elite Pro Basketball is a 5×5 Pro Basketball League featuring 12 teams filled with Indian players. The Jaipur Giants has signed former Indian National Team player and current Indian Railways player, Prakash Mishra, as their marquee player, and have also drafted Rajat Shrivastava and Samuel Gali, among others. The league is organised by Elite Sports India (ESI) and is scheduled to begin matches in January 2023.
The organisers said that from his experience as a varsity athlete at Cornell University and his current sports activities, Brown clearly understands the life-changing and life-long positive impact sports can have on young athletes and is thrilled to play a role in the Elite Pro Basketball league.
In 2016, Brown attended the AIU National Championship Basketball Tournament in Mumbai and recognised the enormous potential of basketball in India. Brown said, “The Elite Pro Basketball League is a natural destination for India’s best university players. And hopefully the very best will come to Jaipur!”
Elite Pro Basketball CEO Sunny Bhandarkar said, “We are pleased to welcome Bradshaw Capital to Elite Pro Basketball and having someone of Brown’s stature as a team owner, assures us that the League is on the road to great success, and we are committed to growing basketball in India.”
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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.
