VZY names new CTO and product chief to sharpen its streaming push

MUMBAI: Dish TV’s connected entertainment platform VZY has gone shopping for talent, and it has shopped well. Uttam Tiwari walks in as chief technology officer, while Edwin Charles Albert takes charge as senior vice president, product. Both will report into Varun Jha, chief business officer, as VZY tries to solve a problem that has bedevilled every streaming platform on the planet: too much content, too little way of finding it.

The hires are shrewd. Tiwari arrives from BharatPe, where he ran engineering for the consumer business, and carries scar tissue from CARS24, Airtel Payments Bank, Microsoft, Tesco, GE Healthcare and IBM. That is not a resume built on TV and entertainment. It is a resume built on scale, cloud infrastructure and distributed systems, which is precisely the plumbing VZY needs if its AI ambitions are to amount to more than a marketing slide. An M.Tech in computational linguistics from IIIT Hyderabad does not hurt either, given where the industry is headed.

Albert brings the other half of the puzzle. His stint at Airtel Digital covered content, product, marketing and partnerships across Xstream, Wynk Music, DTH and IPTV, giving him a rare 360-degree view of how Indian consumers actually behave across screens. Time at TikTok and Times Internet before that means he has built products that people compulsively open, not just products that technically work. Between his stints, he has shaped consumer experiences for more than 130 million monthly active users, a number that ought to translate well to VZY’s ambitions.

The logic behind the twin appointment is sound. Streaming in India has become a maze of apps and subscriptions, and the platform that cracks discovery, not the one with the most content, wins the next round. Manoj Dobhal, CEO and executive director of Dish TV India, called technology and product innovation central to the group’s growth strategy, and the hiring pattern backs that up. Jha went further, arguing that the future of entertainment will be shaped as much by intelligence as by content itself.

There is real ambition here. VZY is not positioning itself as another aggregator bolting search onto a content library. It wants an AI-led layer that sits across streaming, live TV and connected viewing, doing the work of deciding what a viewer should watch before they have to think about it. Whether that vision survives contact with India’s brutally competitive streaming market remains to be seen, but pairing an infrastructure builder with a product and content operator gives Dish TV a fighting chance of executing on it rather than just talking about it.