Manish Kalra: 'There are more than 4000 cities and towns in India and in every city we have a paying subscriber of Zee5'

Manish Kalra – Chief Business Officer and Ms Nimisha Pandey – Chief Content Officer for Hindi Originals for Zee5 opened up on the content slate the platform announced with as many as 111 titles recently and the success and future of Zee5.

Kalra said, “It’s a great stage in our journey. We have multiple minds as compared to last year and we want to continue raising the bar. It’s a super exciting announcement and we are launching 111 titles across nine languages, and it’s a healthy mix of original and movies.“

Pandey added, “The excitement levels are super high because content creation is a long process. It is extremely exciting vendor time finally comes to present the content in front of the audiences. We are really really looking forward to have the viewers react. There is a wonderful and diverse slate we have for them.

On the balance between content and business

Kalra said, “We need to understand what the consumers want, what they like.”

On the journey of Zee5

Pandey stated, “It is heartening to see viewers liking what we are giving them. It’s encouraging to see, Manish you can share the numbers we have in top of our mind. And what I know is that the numbers are great. People are loving watching what we are giving them and this essentially is where the journey is gratifying.

Pandey added, “It’s been an amazing journey, just to give more meat here. Last year we launched 1900 titles across languages. We crossed 190 million viewers and 190 countries watched our content. There are more than 4000 cities and towns in India and in every city we have a paying subscriber. I really take a lot of pride in that because most of the people would assume that subscribers would consume of A-1 cities. We would like to assume that the kind of content our team is creating is connecting people across strata. We have crossed 100 billion minutes on our platform only last year so it’ll keep growing up.”