iWorld
Koo onboards Phaneesh Gururaj as president, technology
Mumbai: Homegrown microblogging platform Koo on Friday brought onboard Phaneesh Gururaj as president- technology to lead the engineering and innovation team at the company. He has moved from redBus as leader of the engineering and product teams.
Along with Gururaj, the technology team at Koo will consist of Google – VP of engineering, Badri Narayan; GoJek – VP & head of mobile division, Pavan Kunchapu; Walmart Labs – engineering leader & head of data platforms, Vivek Yadav. This newly appointed team will be tasked to further accentuate the engineering capabilities and ensure that the technology at Koo is prepared to manage the next level of scale.
“In order to give shape and direction to creating a robust technology platform, Koo has put together a best-in-class engineering team that will work closely with Gururaj in India,” said the company in a statement.
“Koo is the first social media platform that is being built from scratch in India. With the number of languages and features, Koo will eventually offer a robust technology team that will be the backbone of this effort,” said Koo, co-founder & CEO, Aprameya Radhakrishna. “With tremendous experience in building and managing platforms, Phaneesh and team have the credentials to support the growth expected at Koo.”
At the end of August 2021, Koo achieved one crore downloads in just 16 months of going live. Koo is currently available in eight languages and has several pioneering technology features, said the company.
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.
