Sandeep Gulati joins Rahul Tewary Productions as business head

MUMBAI: Twenty years spent haggling over budgets, contracts and content deals will sharpen anyone’s instincts for a good move, and Sandeep Gulati has just made one. The commercial specialist has joined Rahul Tewary Productions as business head, bringing a career built almost entirely on the unglamorous but essential work of keeping television and OTT production humming: negotiations, budget planning, cost control and deal structuring.

Gulati’s résumé reads like a tour of India’s biggest broadcast names. He arrives from Sphereorigins Multivision, where he spent over two years as head of commercial, and before that ran the same function at Swastik Productions for nearly five years. His real grounding came earlier, at Viacom18 Media, where he spent seven years rising to senior director, commercial, followed by a stint at Sony Pictures Networks India as senior manager, commercial. Add spells as head of operations at Optimystix Entertainment and head of production and commercial at Saibaba Telefilms, and the picture is of an executive who has sat on both sides of the production table, at broadcasters and at the studios pitching to them, for the better part of two decades.

That dual vantage point is precisely what a growing production house needs as it scales. Rahul Tewary Productions gets a business head who understands not just how to close an agreement but how to structure one that survives contact with a shooting schedule and a broadcaster’s budget cycle, a skill set built across content production, digital and OTT through some of the industry’s biggest platform shifts. For a company looking to expand its slate without letting costs run away, Gulati’s arrival looks a shrewd, low-drama hire, exactly the sort producers want running the numbers while the creative side gets on with the show.