DreamDTH Explains: What lies ahead for the merger of Zee and Sony?

Sports properties

Zee exited sports broadcasting in 2017 with the sale of the Ten Sports channels to SPN, which had already been operating Sony Six and the now-defunct Sony ESPN until then. These changed to the ‘Sony Ten’ brand, with another big refresh coming during SPN’s mega-rebrand in October 2022 where they adopted the ‘Sony Sports Ten’ name, along with Sony Six becoming Sony Sports Ten 5. The resultant Sony Sports Network boasts of ten channels, five each in SD and HD, though this is smaller than Star Sports’ massive tally of 17 channels including five South Indian channels. Sony has earmarked Sony Sports Ten 3 as its Hindi channel, and Sony Sports Ten 4 as its Tamil/Telugu channel, though distribution of the latter’s HD version remains limited. In the past, it operated Sony ESPN (originally Sony Kix) until it was closed in 2020 along with the Hindi music channel Sony Mix, as well as Sony Ten Golf HD that had been acquired from Zee and was axed at the end of 2018 along with Sony Rox HD and Sony Le Plex HD.

Even though it doesn’t have the immense power of the IPL, ICC and formerly BCCI cricket rights that Star does, in additional to several other events like Wimbledon tennis and Premier League football, Sony Sports Network is nevertheless an all-rounder in terms of sporting rights, with many bilateral cricket rights (like England and Sri Lanka), football leagues (including all UEFA properties), combat sports (like WWE and UFC), tennis (including all Grand Slams other than Wimbledon) and four-yearly multi-sport events like the upcoming Asian Games in Hangzhou, China, and the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. However, despite Zee not currently having any dedicated sports channels, it is now the rightsholder to the ILT20 cricket league in the UAE — which it has aired across its movie channels across multiple languages like Zee Cinema, &pictures, &flix and Zee Thirai, besides the lifestyle channel Zee Zest.

Zee and Sony will be up against severe competition from both Disney Star (which is cutting down on big unsustainable investments) and, more importantly, Reliance. The Mukesh Ambani-led conglomerate, which runs the Viacom18 broadcast network and the Jio telecom operator, won the global rights to Indian BCCI cricket events on 31 August 2023 for a five-year period across both broadcast and digital, and also bagged the ISL (Indian Super League) football rights not long after. This will tremendously shore up JioCinema’s sports portfolio — and also the Sports18 channels, of which there are very few currently — as it has done with the IPL (digital rights only) as well as the women’s WPL and the 2022 FIFA World Cup (both broadcast and digital rights). There is also the matter of the ICC international cricket rights, which Disney Star originally bought for a gigantic US$3 billion and then sub-licensed to Zee for half that amount — a one-of-a-kind deal in sports. This deal is dependent on the merger going through, and therefore it is crucial that Zee and Sony play united as one team against a fierce opposition, in one of the world’s biggest, most cut-throat sports markets.

Regional channels

We can see that Zee’s biggest core strength is its diverse regional offering, with almost as many regional channels on its own (27) as Disney Star (34) and Sun (32), across an impressive nine languages, with Assamese (where no national broadcaster has any presence) and Gujarati (where Viacom18 has a monopoly) being the big exceptions. Sony has only two regional channels, Sony Aath (Bengali) and Sony Marathi, neither of which has an HD feed — not counting the Tamil/Telugu sports channel Sony Sports Ten 4 (HD) — as regional channels haven’t been a big priority for the broadcaster all these years. However, it has smartly waited for the merger to consolidate its regional offerings and leverage Zee’s existing brand — instead of spending extra resources in trying to build its own brand from scratch in other regional languages — and its success with Sony Marathi cannot always be easily replicated elsewhere.

Of particular importance is Marathi, the language where Zee has been proudest of launching multiple channels, well beyond the single GEC and movie channel seen in other languages — despite being decimated by Star Pravah in the ratings chart. Over the years, in order to add to its main Marathi channels, Zee Marathi (GEC) and Zee Talkies (movies), it launched Zee Yuva, a secondary GEC; Zee Chitramandir, a dedicated movie offering for DD Free Dish; and Zee Vajwa, a youth-oriented music channel. Tragically, Zee Vajwa lasted barely over a year (October 2020 to March 2022) before it was shuttered, with Zing being Zee’s only youth/music channel in any language — as Zee Vajwa itself had replaced another Hindi music channel, Zee ETC Bollywood. Now that Sony Marathi — which celebrated its 5^th birthday on 19 August 2023 — will also join this set of Marathi channels, it is highly likely that one or two of these channels will be axed, with the most likely candidate being Zee Yuva, as it has failed to achieve much success in the seven years of its existence.

In other languages, Zee has built a solid presence over the years, including launching new movie channels (Zee Thirai, Zee Cinemalu, Zee Picchar in the South; Zee Biskope in Bhojpuri) as well as HD feeds for all its major regional GECs and movie channels in the big six languages — excluding Zee Bangla Cinema, which for some reason has not been part of Zee’s HD plans. In particular, Zee has built its presence from scratch in the Malayalam-speaking state of Kerala — and with great success at that, as Zee Keralam has leapfrogged other competitors like Mazhavil Manorama to bag the No. 2 position, though it is well behind Disney Star’s Asianet. Furthermore, Zee Kannada is now the number one channel in Karnataka, beating out Colors Kannada, with Star Suvarna trailing behind.

Though other Zee channels are also at second place after their Star counterparts — like Zee Telugu and Star Maa, or Zee Bangla and Star Jalsha — they are nevertheless more successful than their struggling competitors from other broadcasters, especially Sun (except Sun TV, which is the No. 1 Tamil channel by a long distance, and one of India’s top 5 channels) and Viacom18. Moreover, Zee’s presence in smaller languages like Punjabi, Bhojpuri and Odia is noteworthy, especially as Disney Star historically shunned them until launching the Odia-language Star Kiran in 2022 — including in HD — and hopefully Zee Sarthak will also get an HD feed in due course, as Odia channels finally become closer to their bigger counterparts. With Zee Punjabi being relaunched in 2020, only Gujarati (from which Zee exited way back in 2009) and Assamese are left, and if Zee–Sony launches channels in these two languages as well, its regional coverage will be unbeatable.

English and niche channels

Both Zee and Sony have had a longstanding presence in smaller genres like the English movie, kids’ and infotainment/lifestyle genres, adding colour and diversity to Indian TV — though several channels have gone off air in the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic. Their offerings are briefly outlined here.

• English GEC: Zee has a single English GEC, Zee Café, which pales against the dominance of Viacom18’s Comedy Central and Colors Infinity in this sector. SPN, for its part, used to operate AXN for 20 years until shuttering it in 2020, much like Disney Star axed the Star World channels in March 2023 after a decade or two.
• English movies: Both have had an English movie channel for nearly two decades: Sony Pix (since 2006) and &flix (launched in 2000; became Zee Studio in 2005; renamed to &flix in 2018). Zee also has had a niche, premium English movie channel, &privé HD, since 2017 which also shows foreign movies. SPN’s counterpart, Sony Le Plex HD, had a brief existence from 2016 to 2018 when it was abruptly closed along with Sony Rox HD (a Hindi music channel) and Sony Ten Golf HD.
• Kids’: Sony has the solitary Sony YAY! in this genre, which replaced the anime-oriented Animax in 2017 — though the latter (which was sold by Sony to an independent company, KC Global Media) made a comeback on JioTV and JioFiber in early 2023, but not traditional TV platforms. Zee used to operate its own kids’ channel, ZeeQ, from 2012 until its closure in 2017.
• Music/youth: Zee’s sole music/youth channel in any language today is Zing, a Hindi music channel with some youth shows, which competes head-to-head with Viacom18’s far more successful MTV. As with AXN, Sony completely exited the Hindi music genre in 2020 by pulling the plug on Sony Mix — which had been launched in 2011 — not long after it similarly axed the short-lived Sony Rox HD.
• Lifestyle and infotainment: Zee has long had a channel for food, travel and lifestyle: its name has changed from the original Zee Khana Khazana in 2011, to Living Foodz in 2015, to Zee Zest since 2020. SPN, meanwhile, has operated the infotainment (knowledge) channel Sony BBC Earth since 2017, which airs mostly shows on wildlife, natural history and exploration, as its name suggests.

Next page: OTT platforms (Zee5 and SonyLIV); international channels; other assets like Zee Music Company, Zee Studios and SPN’s Studio NEXT