iWorld
ZEE5 launches ‘Azaadi Ka Jashn, ZEE5 Ke Sang’
Mumbai: As a part of ZEE5 Manoranjan Festival, ZEE5 has announced the launch of ‘Azadi Ka Jashn, ZEE5 Ke Sang’ campaign to commemorate India’s 78th year of Independence. Under the campaign, ZEE5 offers free access to 61 SVOD titles between 10 August and 8 September 2024. The initiative is in line with the brand’s vision to empower audiences, offering quality choices, while democratizing entertainment for all.
The line-up features successful titles across eight languages: Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Punjabi, Kannada, Marathi, and Malayalam, highlighting the rich cultural and linguistic diversity of India. The month-long campaign showcases some of the most prominent titles including URI: The Surgical Strike, State of Siege: Temple Attack, Attack, Zombivli, Veergati, Har Har Mahadev, Valimai, Republic, Head Bush, Parineeta, Keedam, Maurh, among others.
ZEE5 India chief business officer Manish Kalra said, “At ZEE5, it has always been an endeavour to democratise the accessibility to best-in-class entertainment while offering better value propositions to our consumers. We have designed the ZEE5 Manoranjan Festival to cater to the growing appetite for quality content across multiple markets, including tier II and III cities. The campaign underscores our dedication to offer diverse, engaging stories to our viewers, and the ZEE5 Manoranjan Festival is a celebration of that promise.”
ZEE5 India head of AVOD marketing and YouTube revenue Abhirup Datta said, “Our festive campaigns have always been loved by the audience and we are eager to bring them back this year. With ‘Azadi Ka Jashn, ZEE5 Ke Sang’, we aim to empower ZEE5’s audiences with choice by bringing a wide selection of premium SVOD content titles across languages, at no cost for a limited period. It is our commitment to foster an inclusive entertainment landscape where every consumer on the platform can experience quality storytelling.”
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.
