Sony Pictures has just merged their company with another International media giant, ZEE5 Entertainment, and have become a media powerhouse. Together, both companies will pool in a lot of subsidiary media companies, with two of the most important ones being their streaming platforms – ZEE5 and SonyLIV. Sony Pictures will hold the controlling 53% stake of the merger, while the remaining 47% will be owned by ZEE5. What’s more – Punit Goenka gets to stay on as MD and CEO of this new company.
While SonyLIV and ZEE5 are the two streaming platforms owned by this new company, two other major International OTT platforms will be added to the merger once it fully goes through – Crunchyroll and Funimation. While the latter is not as popular as the former, they are both Internationally recognised anime-only streaming platforms. They are the biggest rivals to Netflix when it comes to streaming anime internationally and with this merger, Sony will be in a position to beat in Netflix (when it comes to streaming and releasing anime).
With two major OTT platforms under one merger conglomerate – it makes sense to pool the libraries together to make one “Super OTT” platform. The new company will now own 75 TV channels, two video streaming services (the aforementioned ZEE5 and Sony LIV), two film studios and a digital content studio. This means that there is going to be a lot of content up for grabs, for streaming. All these additional subsidiaries will make this new company India’s largest entertainment network.
Still, everything eventually comes down to “the streaming wars” and Sony Pictures & Zee Entertainment have put themselves in prime position to take on the likes of Netflix, Disney+ Hotstar and Amazon Prime Video. With enough time and effort, we could be looking at the next big streaming platform since Disney+. We just have to wait and see