Zee’s Subhash Chandra receives CASBAA Lifetime Achievement Award

It was a Zee-lous moment for Subhash Chandra of Essel Group, when he was awarded the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award at the CASBAA Convention, being organised in Hong Kong. In his acceptance speech after receiving the award, Chandra narrated the initial Zee experience of October 1992, when it took 21 months to convince companies even for a transponder for the channel.

The challenge had only just begun, and within six months of Zee TV's launch, the investors wanted out. ''The investors were happy when they made the deal to exit, but later was a different story,'' reminisced Chandra. He went on to state that the success of Zee TV was important for the opening of this industry, and that there were other industry veterans who deserved to be acknowledged for where the industry had reached today.

In a short film, Chandra shared this achievement with Network18's Raghav Bahl, NDTV Group's Prannoy Roy and UTV's Ronnie Screwvala. ''This award is for those who made Zee successful and each of these names has contributed to the success of Zee before they went on to make their own media empires,'' Chandra remarked.

Speaking on the occasion, Chandra recalled that at one time, he didn't know, or have the aspiration of creating a 30-channel empire that would be covering 160 countries. He added that the cable industry has still not felt the pinch of DTH, thanks to the overspending in terms of investments and under-declaration and under-indexation in advertisement sales.