Soon after a disagreement and discontinuing the partnership with Reliance Jio, one of the largest Indian media platform Zee Entertainment Enterprises (ZEE) has entered into a 3-year multi-layered association with the largest telecom player Bharti Airtel.
Following this partnership, Zee and Airtel will work together closely and create exclusive video content for Airtel’s video-on-demand app Airtel TV as well as for ZEE’s over-the-top (OTT) app ZEE5.
Along with this, around 50 million Airtel TV app users will get access to ZEE5 content constituting ZEE5 Originals, movies, TV shows, plays and more as the subscription cost will be patched under Airtel TV’s plan.
“It’s a larger partnership and a win-win for both of us. Airtel brings a huge consumer base, which today, potentially, is not even exposed to the OTT world or even some of the new age youth audience which is not available to TV,” said Punit Goenka MD of ZEE.
With this association, Airtel will also be sharing consumer insights and data of the users with ZEE as stated in the contract. Goenka also stated that based on the demographics of Airtel TV consumers, ZEE will see which pieces of content are best fit for which platform.
Talking about the Reliance Jio partnership, none of these things were a part of their deal, and thus Goenka feels that they were not getting fair value for its content. It was reported on August 8, 2018, that ZEE has removed all its content from Reliance Jio, including 35 live TV channels and also more than 2 lakh hours of video-on-demand content was removed after failing to reach an agreement on price.
“The Jio exit and Airtel deal are independent of each other. We have been in talks with Airtel for long,” Goenka excalimed. “This doesn’t mean that we don’t want a deal with Jio. I would love to offer our content on Jio, provided we get a fair value. But going ahead, we will ask for consumer insights also to be part of the deal.”
Basically, the company is trying to state that withdrawing content from Jio and the deal with Airtel are connected.