News Broadcasting
Pogo officially launched but not to be seen
NEW DELHI/MUMBAI: Pogo, the new kids channel from the Turner stable, seems to have become a victim of the ongoing CAS controversy. At least in North India and Mumbai the channel, which debuted on 1 January, is not to be seen.
Though the official spokesperson for Turner International India insisted that the channel has been launched as scheduled on Thursday, he could only confirm that Pogo was available in Bangalore.
Cable operators in Mumbai and Delhi pointed out that with all the confusion around CAS, Pogo could wait.
A senior executive of Hathway Datacom, a multi-system operator (MSO) in which Star has 26 per cent equity stake, said, “We haven’t received the boxes for Pogo in Delhi and with CAS taking up our time, we cannot be really bothered about a kids channel, which can wait.”
An independent operator in Delhi, Home Cable’s Vikki Chowdhry, pointed out, “With so much of confusion already around, why contribute to it by adding another channel (Pogo) to the list? The pricing of the channel would throw up another controversy.”
Even senior executives of Siti Cable, a Zee Telefilms arm, were not sure whether Pogo was being shown on their networks in the country or not. Zee Telefilms has a distribution joint venture with Turner, called Zee Turner Pvt. Ltd.
Similar comments were voiced by representatives of INCableNet, Hathway and Siti Cable in Mumbai as well. Siti Cable officials in Mumbai however, did point to the possibility of Pogo being included as part of the MSO’s channel offerings by mid-January or thereabouts.
However, the Turner India spokesperson told indiantelevision.com over phone that in places like Bangalore, Pogo was very much part of the cable networks and that the boxes needed to access Pogo, a digitally encrypted channel, had already been seeded in the market.
In November, Turner India had announced that it would launch a brand new channel for kids and people in their early teens, especially customised for the Indian market, from 1 January.
Beaming off the PAS 10 satellite, Pogo features live action, drama, movies and series. The USP of the channel, however, will be feature films that will be regularly aired and will differentiate it from existing channels for kids, notably sister channel Cartoon Network and rival Nickelodeon.
News Broadcasting
Senior media executive Madhu Soman exits Zee Media
Former Reuters and Bloomberg leader says he leaves with “no regrets” after brief stint at WION and Zee Business
NOIDA: Madhu Soman, a veteran of global newsrooms and media sales floors, has stepped away from Zee Media Corporation after a short stint steering business strategy for WION and Zee Business.
In a reflective LinkedIn note marking his departure, Soman said his time within the network’s corridors was always likely to be brief. “Some chapters close faster than expected,” he wrote, signalling the end of a nearly two-year spell in which he oversaw both editorial partnerships and commercial strategy.
Soman joined Zee Media in 2022 after more than a decade abroad with Reuters and Bloomberg, returning to India to take on the role of chief business officer for WION and Zee Business. His mandate was ambitious: bridge the newsroom and the revenue desk while expanding digital and broadcast reach.
During the stint, Zee Business reached break-even for the first time since its launch in 2005, while WION refreshed programming and strengthened its digital footprint across platforms such as YouTube and Facebook.
But Soman suggested the cultural fit proved uneasy. Describing himself as a “cultural misfit”, he hinted at deeper tensions between editorial instincts shaped in global newsrooms and the realities of India’s television news ecosystem.
Before joining Zee, Soman spent more than seven years at Bloomberg in Hong Kong as head of broadcast sales for Asia-Pacific, expanding the company’s news syndication business across several markets. Earlier, he held senior editorial roles at Reuters, overseeing online strategy in India and managing Reuters Video Services from London.
His career began in television and wire reporting, including a stint with ANI during the 1999 Kargil conflict, before moving into digital publishing as India’s internet media landscape took shape.
Now, after nearly three decades in broadcast and digital media, Soman is leaving Delhi NCR and returning to his hometown, Trivandrum.
Exhausted, he admits. But unbowed. And with one quiet line that sums up the journey: he didn’t sell his soul — because some things, after all, are not for sale.
