It has been a long journey for the man whom the industry more or less wrote off a couple of decades ago. No one believed then that Chandra could make a commercial success of broadcasting when he paid $5 million, against the street price of $1.2 million, to hire his first transponder to beam channels through satellite before cable TV arrived. Chandra envisioned several businesses ahead of their times—a flexi-tube packaging company, an entertainment theme park, a cable TV company, and a DTH business. Group sales have risen from nearly Rs 2 crore in 1992 to $2.5 billion now, and market capitalisation from nil to $5 billion.

But several of Chandra’s lofty ideas haven’t quite panned out. His early business, Essel Propack, a speciality packaging company, has a market capitalisation of only $100 million, while EsselWorld is no longer a force to reckon with, given the stiff competition from Manmohan Shetty’s massive theme park, Adlabs Imagica. Siti Cable, the early multi-system cable operator, hasn’t made a profit in five years. Today, the major companies under the Zee umbrella are Zee Entertainment, Zee News, Zee Learn, Siti Cable, Dish TV, EsselWorld, and lottery business Playwin. These are the businesses that give Chandra revenue—as well as a reputation as a successful entrepreneur.

By opting to go global, Chandra is doing what most Indian companies did when their home bases were threatened. Bajaj Auto, for instance, bought boutique speed bike company KTM as it could not mount a direct attack on market leader Hero Motors, or technology leader Honda, which began expanding in India after breaking up with Hero. “No one has come to us to review a globalisation plan but sooner or later, Indian companies have to seek new avenues for growth,” says Jehil Thakkar, partner and head of the media and entertainment practice at consultancy KPMG. And Chandra could be the first in that space.

Veria TV in the U.S. is not a new venture; Chandra kicked it off in 2009 when Zee’s ratings in India were slipping due to poor programming choices. At the time, Veria was pitched as a niche health and wellness channel, but made little headway for two years, and cable distributors were not keen on promoting it. Says Chandra: “In the first two years, even my American staff could not understand the long-surviving concept of happiness in the eastern cultures and how to showcase it without becoming preachy.”

At the time, says Chandra, the Zee board wanted to pull the plug on Veria as it was sucking up too much money and executive time. (Veria is still called the “chairman’s project” within Zee.) But Chandra spearheaded several changes to put Veria on the growth track. One significant step was a branding change, which included a new logo, and re-positioning Veria as a general entertainment channel. That meant Veria could be bundled with several other channels and sold as a package, instead of relying on individual subscriptions as a niche channel. Veria was also distributed through DTH.

General entertainment channels don’t rely on subscriptions; they feed off advertising revenue that is based on viewership data. That data is provided in the U.S. by tracking agency Nielsen only to channels that are available in 45 million to 50 million homes. That’s more than double Veria’s current reach of 20 million.

This means that Veria’s advertising revenue is limited until it can show viewership statistics from Nielsen; Chandra’s target is for the channel to reach 50 million homes by 2015. “The good news is that we get 75,000 to 100,000 new views on DTH every month and that acts as a surrogate for viewership,” says Paul Cestari, general manager, Veria Living.

Chandra’s focus on turning Veria around worked, and today in the U.S., Veria Living is expanding its scope beyond broadcast. It is already test-marketing cosmetics, and there are plans to launch branded food supplements. It will also be opening wellness centres, inspired by the offline activities of Yoga Journal, a popular American yoga magazine, which conducts conferences and workshops throughout the year to enlarge its franchise.

Long-time analysts of Zee, such as Nikhil Vora, equity research analyst with investment firm IDFC, still don’t track it closely as there are no commercial disclosures available on Veria Living or the new channel. But Chandra says there are no doubts about Veria’s viability and that there is an opportunity in going global.

Content is not being ignored in all this. Chandra is ensuring the creation of original content, to be able to make rights available across mediums, including the Internet. Says Raymond Donahue, head of programme sales and content distribution of Veria: “We found that buying rights across mediums is always a problem for specialised programming, and we are ensuring our content library will eventually work to our advantage.”

It may be too early to say if Chandra will succeed in creating a winner in Veria. But if there is anyone who can navigate the labyrinth of the global entertainment business, it is him. A decade ago, Chandra fought off media baron Rupert Murdoch’s bid to own Zee. Last year, Chandra tied up with Murdoch’s channel Star to create a venture to jointly distribute the two companies’ channels.

The show of unity with Murdoch comes at the right time; the industry today seems to need all hands on deck to be able to bargain effectively for better regulations with the government. Zee will gain if the government allows broadcasters more room in pricing channels to distributors.

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