India’s Viacom18 has been active at various TV trade shows in the past few years, but few participants actually knew what the company was all about or what its main business was.
Last month VideoAge Daily at Content Americas reported Disney’s plans to sell its India media business. And now, The Wall Street Journal has reported that Walt Disney has reached a preliminary agreement to sell 60 percent of its shares of its India’s media unit to Viacom18 for $1.5 billion, which could explain the importance of the Indian company.
Viacom18 is a partnership between Reliance Industries (owned by India’s Mukesh Ambani), Paramount Global, and Bodhi Tree System (co-owned by James Murdoch).
The sale indicates Disney’s challenges in operating in a huge market with people speaking multiple languages, in addition to the difficulties caused by the drop of value of the rupee currency against the U.S. dollar (20 percent since 2019), which resulted in Disney’s revenue for its Indian streaming app Hotstar lowered to $.70 per month per subscriber, and the reduction of the subscriber base from 61.3 million in 2022 to the current 37.6 million.
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