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February 3, 2014

Indian media giant enters Indonesia’s pay TV market
Mariel Grazella, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Major Indian media and entertainment company, Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd., has officially set foot in the Indonesian market through the launch of Z Bioskop, a 24-hour pay television channel dedicated to Bollywood movies.

“We are coming into Indonesia with two channels, with one based on entertainment and movies and the other on health and wellness,” Zee Entertainment founder and chairman, Subhash Chandra, said.

Zee Entertainment runs the largest Hindi entertainment channel globally, and owns the biggest Hindi movie library as well. With its 34 channels and more than 700 million viewers worldwide, approximately 12 percent of the media company’s total revenue in 2013 is expected to come from international subscriptions

Zee Entertainment plans to introduce a wellness and lifestyle channel, Veria Living, shortly after launching Z Bioskop.

Chandra said that Zee Entertainment has inked deals with three pay TV operators, namely Aora, Orange TV and K-Vision, to relay Z Bioskop and Veria Living to their subscribers.

Aora and Orange TV have both started broadcasting Z Bioskop in January. Meanwhile, Veria Living will be available at a later date on Orange Television and K-Vision.

Chandra added that the entertainment company had approached other pay TV operators as well to attain their business goal in Indonesia.

“We certainly want to be in 1.5 million homes in the 12 months between now and January 2015,” Chandra told The Jakarta Post on Thursday.

Chandra added that Zee Entertainment found the pay television industry promising to enter because “there is growth every year” as the Indonesian audience continued to demand for premium content.

The number of pay television subscriptions in Indonesia is predicted to hit 7 million subscriptions in 2017 from 2.4 million in 2012, according to the data from Media Partners Asia 2013.

Chandra added that Zee Entertainment would move through the competitive market by offering niche content. “I do not want to compete with Time Warner and other Hollywood content, so I have created my own niche,” he said.

Zee Entertainment country manager, Maria Liza Y. Ginting, said that Z Bioskop would stream roughly eight Bollywood movies per day, each dubbed in Bahasa Indonesia.

“We are allocating three-hour slots per movie with some promotions in between,” she said, adding that Zee Entertainment had a library of 120,000 old and new Bollywood movies.

She added that although content from other countries such as Korea and China have become available, Bollywood still attracted audiences both young and old. “Our target for Z Bioskop is whole families,” she pointed out.

Meanwhile, Veria Living would feature fresh programs on health and wellness, such as yoga, she further noted.

“Veria Living is the only pay television here in the wellness genre,” she said, adding that Indonesians are jumping aboard the global trend of wellness.

Chandra added that Zee Entertainment did not regard the presence of pirated Bollywood movies in the market as a wet blanket to doing business in Indonesia.

“It [piracy] is everywhere and no market is an exception,” he said.