Zee Entertainment, one of India’s top three broadcasting companies, has unveiled new channel packs ahead of the TRAI deadline on December 29 to switch to a new tariff scheme.
The packs, which include news channels from sister company Zee Media, are designed to push’s Zee’s offerings into maximum households.
As such, the company does not offer many choices in each market.
In its core markets such as Hindi and Marathi, the company offers only two packs for each broadcasting standard — All in One Pack and Family Pack.
In emerging markets where it doesn’t enjoy much brand presence, such as Tamil and Malayalam, the company offers three packages, including a stripped down version called Prime Pack.
The company does not break off its English channels into a separate pack, or offer a bouquet that consists only of English channels.
As such, anyone who wishes to watch its two English movie channels, for example, will also have to buy the company’s Indian language channels as well.
The cheapest pack that contains the company’s HD movie channels — &Flix and &Prive — is the Tamil All In One (AIO) priced at Rs 95 per month.
In its established markets, Zee Entertainment offers two packs — Family and All In One. The Family Pack consists of the company’s Indian offerings and is priced between Rs 50-80 per month, depending on the market and the broadcasting standard (HD or otherwise).
All In Ones are priced between Rs 60-105, again depending on the market and standard.
The costliest packs are found in the Marathi market, while the cheapest are found in the Tamil market.
Below you can find a list of channel packages from Zee Entertainment that come into effect on December 2.
In addition to the other packs, Zee also offers certain other combi-bouquets, such as Marathi-Kannada, Odiya-Telugu and so on in its legal documents.
The packs are in addition to the option of selling the channels one-by-one. The company has, separately, unveiled single-channel tariffs as well.
The issue of package pricing has generated a lot of controversy, with cable operators accusing broadcasters of pricing the single channels so high that existing genre-based packs — such as those for movies, news and entertainment — have become unworkable.
The sector regulator TRAI is also not pleased with the turn of events and has approached the Supreme Court in an effort to force broadcasters to offer their individual channels at a reasonable rates so that consumers who are interested in one or two of their channels don’t need to buy a whole package of irrelevant offerings to watch them.
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