Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd (ZEEL) on December 19 launched four new regional channels - Zee Punjabi, Zee Biskope (Bhojpuri), Zee Thirai (Tamil) and Zee Picchar (Kannada).
Out of the four channels, two will be launched in the fourth quarter.
Zee Punjabi will be launched on January 13 next year and Biskope will start beaming from December 31 this year.
"In the last four to five years, if you look at the regional viewership then all Hindi i.e., GEC and movies was let’s say 38 percent of the total television consumption. All languages (GEC+movies) were around 32 percent. So, there is movement ahead of overall market growth in all regional markets put together. Plus, if you look at the movie genre it has grown in the regional market 2x of the total viewership growth of the country," said Punit Misra, CEO, Domestic Broadcast Business, ZEEL.
Along with this, ZEE's regional portfolio contributes to more than 50 percent of its overall share with GECs contributing almost 90 percent of ZEE's regional share.
This explains why Zee decided to go ahead with the launch of three regional movie channels.
In addition, the broadcasting network is upbeat about the Punjabi language market as well.
"We are going ahead with Punjabi because we think it is an attractive market and attractive culture to create content. It is a rich language yet ironical that there is no Punjabi language show for people to watch. Punjab is an interesting market as there isn’t a GEC reference there," said Misra.
Currently, Zee is present across eight regional languages, including Marathi, Bengali, Oriya, and Bhojpuri in HSM (Hindi Speaking Markets) and all four southern languages.
Zee Punjabi will take that count to 11 languages.
Earlier this month, Zee Entertainment CEO and Managing Director Punit Goenka had said that they have identified critical regional markets that have gaps in Zee's portfolio.
A KPMG report titled India’s Digital Future: Mass of Niches points out that while 43 percent of the total GEC (General Entertainment Channel) viewership in 2018 came from Hindi, the four south-Indian language markets together matched up to Hindi in terms of sheer size.
The average consumption per day for these languages was nearly 2.5 hours a day, much higher than that of Hindi.
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