Zee’s international business/syndication boss, Sunita Uchil, has the full-blown co-pro bug. And while the strategy kicked off with blue-chip factual, no genre is out of bounds as she explores the space.

Zee’s international syndication/business boss, Sunita Uchil, has had her head in a new space and her heart set on big blue-chip global co-productions for more than a year, even before she heard about (or perhaps as a result of) Talesmith’s Life of Earth 4K/UHD special tracing 4.5 billion year history. The co-pro with Smithsonian Networks International – which Uchil to this day describes as “my baby” – was announced in October 2017.

Today, with Life of Earth: From Space done and ready, Uchil has the full-blown co-pro bug, planning at least one, and maybe two, similar projects a year, charting a new course for Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd’s (ZEEL) and expanding perception of the company as a heavyweight drama producer.

Thinking of Zee as a drama/general entertainment powerhouse is not, she hastens to add, “a wrong perception”. But she wants more. “There’s a paucity of this kind of content”, especially among mass market players, she says of her maiden blue-chip factual foray.

As part of her current global content surge and her remit as chief business officer, international ad sales, global syndication and production, Uchil is also prioritising remakes. A 52-episode African version of Zee’s Pavitra Rishta, a co-production with Nigerian agency Mace and Ghana’s Multimedia Group, was announced in November. This second African series follows Khwaabon Ke Darmiyaan (2016), a co-pro between Zee in Dubai and India with RTI from the Ivory Coast. The drama remakes followZee’s expansion into formats, including creating Dance India Dance. The driver behind all of this? “We have a vision of doing more,” she says.

For India, Uchil talks about a “different level of awareness”, about content that caters to a whole new generation of consumers. “As disposable income rises in India, there will be a need for better content, people are more discerning, and more fragmented,” she says. This may still be a one-TV household market, but smart phones have changed the game across all socio-economic groups. “The smartphone is India’s second screen... TV will continue, but we will see a huge change in content coming out of India”.

Uchil says broadcasters in India “have a natural advantage” in creating engaging content experiences for streaming audiences. For one, local players have two decades or more of original content along with an understanding of the native segments, like Marathi, Tamil, Kanada.... Zee has content in at least 12 languages. “That’s a huge benefit,” she says.

Published in Issue Seven of ContentAsia's in-print + online 2018 (December 2018)