MAM
ESPN STAR Sports announces new appointments
28 June 2006, New Delhi – ESPN STAR Sports, Asia’s number one sports broadcaster today announced new appointments to its management team with Sharon van Zwieten taking on the role of Executive Producer, News. She takes over from Dez Corkhill, who has moved on to a new role as Executive Producer, Mobile Production.
Sharon will be based in Singapore with region-wide responsibility for the network’s award winning sports news programme, SportsCenter. She will report directly to Huw Bevan, Senior Vice-President, Production.
Sharon is an all-around international communications professional and brings over more than 20 years of experience in broadcast, broadband, online and print media. She began her broadcast career as a reporter, assignment editor and anchor in Iowa, USA, working for KDUB-TV. She later took up News Producer roles across the US before her appointment as Director of Public Relations and Communications for CyberSpace Solutions in Illinois, USA.
The lure of broadcast journalism proved too hard to resist for Sharon and she packed her bags for Asia, with an appointment as Producer for CNBC/Asia Business News where she created and produced dot.com, a weekly half hour show about the Internet. Sharon later joined CNN International in Hong Kong as a Writer and Producer for CNN This Morning Asia.
Sharon moved back to the USA in 2000 where she joined CNN in Atlanta, as Supervising Producer and Executive Producer, where she supervised the newsroom and helped launch Daybreak, CNN’s early morning newscast.
Before joining ESPN STAR Sports, she was Senior Executive Producer at CNN in New York.
Sharon holds a Bachelor of Arts in English and History from the University of Michigan and a Master of Arts in Journalism from Northwestern University.
ESPN STAR Sports is a 50:50 joint venture between two of the world’s leading cable and satellite broadcasters, ESPN Inc. and STAR. We are Asia’s complete sports provider reaching over 138 million households for ESPN and over 63 million households for STAR Sports. We have 13 networks – ESPN Asia, ESPN India, ESPN Taiwan, ESPN Philippines, MBC-ESPN (Korea), ESPN Singapore, ESPN Hong Kong, STAR Sports Asia, STAR Sports India, STAR Sports Taiwan, STAR Sports Singapore, STAR Sports S.E.A and STAR Sports Hong Kong. We bring the world’s premier live sports and leading regional events to viewers 24 hours a day. On the ground, the ESPN STAR Sports Event Management Group manages and promotes premier sporting events around Asia, including the Asian X Games and the San Miguel Asian 9Ball Tour. On- ine, espnstar.com, espnstar.com.cn and espnstar.com.tw interact with millions of users providing them with in-depth sports news, results and competitions. This multilingual, online platform which is closely integrated with ESPN and STAR Sports on air networks, has established the sites as the number one on-line sports destination in their respective markets.
For further information, please contact:
Bhaskar Majumdar, Manager – Corporate Communications, 9811194244, Email: bhaskarm@espnstar.co.in Or Tarundeep Singh, IPAN at 011- 42492100,
9811017310 Email: tarundeep.singh@ipan.com
For the latest schedules and programme information visit www.espnstar.com
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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.
