iWorld
ZEE5 partners with quaero to Orchestrate its complex customer data
MUMBAI: ZEE5, India’s fastest growing ConTech brand today announced its partnership with Quaero, an Enterprise Customer Data Platform provider, to power its big data capabilities and mine customer insights.
Having tipped over the 80 million subscribers base this year, ZEE5 realized that data operations complexity is already a reality. This highlights the need for a strong and robust data lake- data mart architecture. The partnership with Quaero enables ZEE5 with seamless data flow from sources, build unified customer view, automate data operations on cloud and a create a two-way connector to all current and future ZEE5 partners. With unique and differentiated access, the expected benefactors of this platform at ZEE5 are the IT, Data Science and Analytics, and Marketing teams. ZEE5 and Quaero foresee the partnership to go over and beyond the current challenges and look at ways to productize data-as-a-product for the media industry.
Ujjyaini Mitra, Head Data Scientist, ZEE5 India said, “This partnership with Quaero will add higher capabilities to our data science team within Zee5, enabling us access to various data streams through a single platform. This will enable granular level insights about our customers and bring down the time to action. Quaero has brought to the project, apart from its robust platform, skilled data scientists and data engineers with over 20 years of rich domain expertise in data and analytics to create a data lake that addresses some of the unique challenges faced by media companies. The Quaero CDP provides strong data governance along with Data Lineage, thereby making us a pioneer in the industry”.
Sandeep Prakash, APAC Business Head, Quaero said, “We launched our APAC operations in 2018 and are excited to have ZEE5 as a major client in the region. Our work for global media brands like Disney and ESPN has enabled us to deliver a cutting-edge data lake solution which is scalable, easy to use, quick, agile & tailored specifically for the media and entertainment industry.”
ZEE5 hosts over 100,000+ hours of content across genres in over 12 languages, thus making it a complex data landscape in terms of volume, velocity and variety. At ZEE5, acquisition of data has never been a concern, but it is accessibility of data in useable form to mine insights, which assumes critical importance considering the impact it can have on the overall business. Thus, the need for a unified customer view by ingesting multiple disparate 1st, 2nd & 3rd party data sources is more important than ever before. Real time insightful data empowers ZEE5 to optimize pricing models and achieve higher audience retention.
Quaero, a new breed data and analytics platform is roped in for building the data stack that can ingest, store and segment these structured and unstructured data. This will provide ZEE5 with a horizontally and vertically scalable data lake and a more powerful and readily usable data mart. The various sources of data contributing to the unified view include clickstream data, product usage data, mobile behavior data, content data (CMS), video consumption data, social data, campaign performance data, ad inventory & performance data and many such. The platform also will act as the backbone of data infrastructure and computation engine for powering ZEE5's dashboards & visualizations.
The platform is expected to deliver Golden Customer Record with a 360-degree view of every customer, enabling smarter, personalized and timely marketing of all content on ZEE5 platform.
Some of the early benefits of embedding Quaero's platform at the core of ZEE5's data stack include better and relevant ad placements, richer experience for paid subscribers, personalization at scale, tailored content production and better revenue conversion & tracking.
The future roadmap for the project also includes new and contemporary data sources, extending it beyond 1st party data to external sources, 2-way connections to downstream marketing applications and creating new products out of the richer data being mined.
iWorld
Tips Music CEO Hari Nair to step down
Girish Taurani and Sushant Dalmia to jointly steer the company as the hunt for a new chief begins
MUMBAI: A leadership shuffle is under way at Tips Music. Hari Nair, the company’s chief executive, will step down on April 30 as the music label begins the search for a successor.
The company said Girish Taurani, executive director, and Sushant Dalmia, chief financial officer, will jointly oversee operations during the transition while the board identifies a permanent replacement.
Nair joined Tips Music in 2023 and set about reshaping the veteran music label into a more digital, data-led enterprise. During his tenure, the company secured licensing and partnership deals with global platforms including Sony Music Publishing and TikTok, while renewing agreements with Warner Music Group.
Drawing on earlier experience in technology and entertainment, including a stint at ByteDance, Nair pushed the organisation towards a performance-driven culture. He built a brand partnerships division and introduced proprietary software systems aimed at strengthening digital distribution and data capabilities.
Kumar Taurani, chairman and managing director, credited Nair with embedding a data-led culture within the company and driving revenue growth in line with shareholder commitments.
In his resignation note, Nair said that after helping transition the label into a modern, digitally focused and process-driven organisation, the time had come to pursue his next leadership challenge.
The leadership change comes as the broader Tips Films group shows signs of financial stabilisation. In the third quarter of FY26 the company reported a net loss of Rs 2.86 crore, narrowing sharply from Rs 14.2 crore in the previous quarter. For the nine months ended December, losses stood at Rs 12.37 crore.
Yet revenue told a more volatile story. Income from operations slid to Rs 4 crore in Q3 FY26 from Rs 56 crore in the preceding quarter, taking total operating income to Rs 4.56 crore.
For a company built on a catalogue of more than 34,000 tracks and decades of Bollywood hits, the next chief will inherit both a digital engine and a volatile music market. The playlist may be familiar, but the next act at Tips Music is only just beginning.
