On Wednesday, ZEE5 India confirmed that Tarun Katial has stepped down from the role of CEO. “We wish to confirm that Tarun Katial has tendered his resignation, as CEO, ZEE5 India. We thank him for his valuable contribution towards the growth of ZEE5. Under his able leadership, in a very short span of time, ZEE5 has emerged as India’s largest ConTech brand, delivering seamless, superlative content across different consumer touch-points, backed with cutting edge technology. His rich experience and expertise have been invaluable in building a robust digital platform. We wish Tarun the best in all his future endeavours,” a company spokesperson said.
The spokesperson further added that in line with the company’s recently announced strategic restructuring of the organisation, Amit Goenka as the president – Digital Businesses and Platforms will continue to lead team ZEE5, along with other digital platforms.
Katial who joined ZEE5 India in November 2016 has been responsible for steering ZEE5 towards gaining an industry leadership position. In just over two years since inception, the platform already hosts 100+ Originals across genres and languages and has seen 100 million plus downloads (Google Play Store).
He has also been instrumental in conceptualizing ‘HiPi’, a fully home-grown short video and various tech and content use cases in nine languages and various taste clusters – a step towards establishing ZEE5 as a digital video super app targeted to the mass, affluent, upwardly mobile Indian. The platform has built end to end technology for consumer data – adtech (including self serve – ad server – performance marketing capabilities) and customer lifecycle management.
An MBA and a Kellogg’s student in digital transformation, Katial began his career with Saatchi, Enterprise Nexus Lowe and Ogilvy & Mather. Pursuant to this, he moved to Star Network and rose to become the head of channels across the network in India before moving to Sony Entertainment as business head. Prior to joining ZEE5, Katial was the founder CEO at BIG FM.