By V. Jagannathan, IANS
Chennai : Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd (ZEEL), one of the country’s leading entertainment groups, is all set to try its luck in the already crowded Tamil satellite channel market for a second time.
The company is proceeding with its plans to launch Zee Tamil, a general entertainment channel, said Zee South CEO G. Ramprasad
“Zee Tamizh will go on air in six months,” said Ramprasad, who is in charge of all four southern language channels – the existing Kannada and Telugu channels and the proposed Tamil and Malayalam channels.
“The television market is now matured with several players. It is now like any other matured business that needs strategy and positioning,” Ramprasad told IANS.
The company, he said, had recruited V. Chandrasekaar as the business head for Zee Tamizh and is scouting for a person to lead the Malayalam channel.
In 2001, Zee had launched Bharathi TV, a Tamil general entertainment channel. However, the channel went off the air soon after its launch due to transmission problems as cable was the only way at that time to reach subscribers.
“Now the distribution scene is different. We have direct home players like group company Dish TV and Tata Sky to take our signals,” said Ramprasad.
After relations between Sun Network that owns Sun Cable Vision, a multi system operator, and the ruling DMK turned sour last year, the Tamil Nadu government started the process of setting up a cable television distribution company.
According to Ramprasad, it was too early to finalise the programming mix for Zee Tamizh.
Presently, there are 20 Tamil channels of which 13 are general entertainment, five music and two news channels.
The channel players are now finding it difficult to get movie rights as the prices have gone up drastically because of competition.