iWorld
Zee5 pockets Friends Reunion; delights Indian fans
MUMBAI: This is one show special which is setting social media ablaze. Ever since, Friends Reunion special’s premiere date on HBO Max in the US was announced as 27 May, many an ardent fans’ pulse was racing, wondering which platform would do the honours in India. Well, it’s Zee5 which has beaten the likes of Netflix, Prime, Disney+Hotstar to the final post and picked up the rights. The announcement was made on Sunday by Zee5 chief business officer Manish Kalra
For a generation and after, Friends, which ran from 1994 to 2004, had a massive following. In India too. To date, it is one of the more popular series on Netflix, even after almost 27 years since its first episode was aired on TV.
The special episode’s trailer has racked up hundreds of millions of views across several channels on YouTube, and wherever else it has been released.
It shows Jenifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Matt LeBlanc, David Schwimmer, Matthew Perry and Lisa Kudrow touring their old sets on the Warner Brothers studio lot followed by a sit down question and answer session with funny man James Corden in front of a live audience. Naturally Corden’s conversations with the six sees a lot of re-enacting from old episodes, reminiscing, leg pulling, and poignant moments leading to a lot of laughs and even tears for them.
For those who came in late, Friends – which was created by David Crane and Marta Kauffman, who executive produced the series with Kevin Bright through Bright/Kauffman/Crane Productions in association with Warner Bros. Television – featured six mates – . Rachel Green (Jennifer Aniston), Monica Geller (Courteney Cox), Phoebe Buffay (Lisa Kudrow), Joey Tribbiani (Matt Le Blanc), Chandler Bing (Matthew Perry), and Ross Geller (David Schwimmer) – in New York and their journey into adulthood.
A gaggle of celebs is slated to join the cast: David Beckham, Justin Bieber, BTS, James Corden, Cindy Crawford, Cara Delevingne, Lady Gaga, Elliott Gould, Kit Harington, Larry Hankin, Mindy Kaling, Thomas Lennon, Christina Pickles, Tom Selleck, James Michael Tyler, Maggie Wheeler, Reese Witherspoon and Malala Yousafzai.
The show had also caused major waves towards its ninth and tenth seasons when the six main leads were paid a million dollars in remuneration for each episode. And it is also known for the cameos that some of the biggest stars in Hollywood at that time made in some episode or the other, right from Brad Pitt to Julia Roberts to Bruce Willis to Sean Penn to Dermot Mulrooney to Winona Ryder to Robin Williams to Billy Crystal to George Clooney to Susan Sarandan to Bonnie Somerville.
The Friends Reunion special credits Aniston, Cox, Kudrow, LeBlanc, Perry, and Schwimmer as executive producers with Ben Winston directing and executive producing alongside Kevin Bright, Marta Kauffman, and David Crane. A production of Warner Bros Unscripted Television in association with Warner Horizon, Fulwell 73 Productions and Bright/ Kauffman/ Crane Productions, it features Emma Conway, James Longman and Stacey Thomas-Muir as co-executive producers.
Observers wonder, why Zee5, which has been focusing on producing originals in different Indian languages, took a decision to acquire the rights for an American show in English and coughed up top dollars for a one-off program.
Kalra gives the reason why. Says he: “Friends is amongst the world’s most watched and loved sitcoms and it is a great opportunity for us to present their reunion, something that the world has been talking about, on Zee5 for Friends fans in India.”
Currently, Zee5 is available at Rs 499 for a 12-month premium plan. The streaming platform has been striving to sign on subscribers; hence it picked the rights to Salman Khan’s Radhe at Rs 230 crore, which led to some 4.2-odd million concurrent viewers logging onto the film’s premiere. Hopefully, the Friends Reunion gamble will pay off and lead to a similar surge.
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.
