The Walt Disney Company India, announced a restructuring of the company’s digital assets in order to better drive growth in games, video and audio services for mobile, online and interactive TV. The new division, DisneyUTV Digital, will combine the businesses and talent from Disney, UTV and Indiagames. All content and brands from Disney, Marvel, UTV, bindass®, as well as original content and games, will now be developed and managed by DisneyUTV Digital.
The digital division will be spearheaded by Vishal Gondal as Managing Director. Samir Bangara also Managing Director of the division and Gondal will work in collaboration to drive DisneyUTV’s future growth. Both Gondal and Bangara built Indiagames into the gaming company, earning close to 50 per cent market share in the country.
The DisneyUTV Digital team will manage all mobile, video, audio, broadband, ITV, games and virtual world’s initiatives, with a combined audience reach of over 300 million in India. Previous successes from the Disney and UTV teams in India include several innovative and popular products in the country including Audio Cinema (a first of its kind movie-on-your-phone service), Divya Kathayein (devotional content on mobile in seven languages), Digital Studio (series of original content developed for the web and mobile), Sponsored Tweets ( the Twitter advertising platform ), successful mobile games such as Aladdin (India’s leading paid mobile game with over 8.2 million downloads), DLF IPL Cricket (the official mobile game for the DLF IPL Franchise), Cricket Fever with over 20 million downloads, Ra.One Genesis (which saw over 1 million downloads within a week of its launch) and Club Penguin, a virtual world for children.
Disney UTV’s digital division will be structured under the following leads:
Cyril Ferry – Executive Director – Mobile
Sameer Pitalwalla – Director – Video and Celebrity
Lavina Tauro – Director – Audio and Music
Deepak Ail – Director – Mobile
Hrishi Oberoi – Director – Games Publishing
Saishree Ashwin – Manager – Virtual Worlds
Tejraj Parab – Business Head – Games on Demand
Dushyant Saraswat – Director – Broadband & 4G initiatives
Sachin Janghel – Director – ITV
Aji Joseph – Director – Ad Sales
