Kevin Vaz to head entertainment biz at Disney; Gaurav Banerjee to lead content

Vaz's remit will include Regional channels, Kids & Infotainment, Star Plus, Star Utsav, Hindi Movies & the English cluster. Banerjee will spearhead content for HSM channels & Disney+ Hotstar

by Javed Farooqui
Published: Sep 9, 2021 9:10 AM | 2 min read

Star & Disney India has elevated Kevin Vaz as the Head of Entertainment, with P&L responsibility for the entire entertainment channel business. As Head of Content, Gaurav Banerjee will spearhead content for HSM entertainment channels and Disney+ Hotstar besides regional content for OTT.

K Madhavan, Country Manager & President, The Walt Disney Company India and Star India, has announced Kevin and Gaurav's new roles in an internal mail to the staff.

Kevin, who is currently the Head of Infotainment, Kids & Regional Entertainment Channels, has got an expanded role as the head of the entire entertainment channel business with P&L responsibility. His remit will include Regional channels, Kids & Infotainment, Star Plus, Star Bharat, Star Utsav, Hindi Movies and the English cluster.

In addition to the existing channel GMs who are directly reporting to him, Star Plus GM Sumanta Bose, Star Bharat GM Arpit Mankar and Star India GM Hindi Movies Hemal Jhaveri will now report to Kevin. Also, Star India EVP — Ad Sales, Entertainment Business Arghya Chakravarty will have a dotted line reporting to Kevin for HSM ad sales in addition to his current reporting to Nitin Bawankule, who is Head of Ad Sales for the network.

Gaurav Banerjee, who is currently Head — Hindi and English Entertainment, will now lead content for the Hindi entertainment channels and Disney+ Hotstar. In his existing role, Gaurav has been leading the entertainment portfolio that included general entertainment, movie channels and Hotstar original content.

The company has decided to create a separate powerhouse for content creation in order to align its structure with Disney's global D2C business and growth strategy.

The content heads of all Hindi channels will report to Gaurav. Nikhil Madhok, EVP & Head Hotstar Original Content, will continue reporting to Gaurav for HSM content development and Disney+ Hotstar originals. Additionally, Hemal Jhaveri will have a dotted line reporting to Gaurav for digital movie rights.

Disney+ Hotstar's Dhawal Gosain, who looks after Operations, Insights, and New Initiatives, will also have a dotted line reporting to Gaurav. Apart from Hemal and Dhawal, all regional channel GMs will also have dotted line reporting to Gaurav for Disney+ Hotstar content.

Working in tandem with Madhavan, Kevin has been instrumental in growing the company's regional entertainment business across Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam markets. Under Gaurav, the network has made rapid strides in content creation in the Hindi GEC and digital content space.

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Published On: Sep 9, 2021 9:10 AM

Tags OTT platform OTT content Star India Gaurav Banerjee Disney+ Hotstar Kevin Vaz Star Disney India elevations