Zee to exit English entertainment; re-enter sports with 4 channels

New Delhi: Zee Entertainment is preparing to switch off its English entertainment play on linear TV and redeploy two long-running brands – Zee Café and &Flix – into sports, creating four feeds in one shot through SD and HD.

According to Zee’s latest Reference Interconnect Offer (RIO), effective April 1, 2026, Zee Café and &Flix will no longer be positioned as English entertainment channels.

In the RIO, the channels are listed under the sports genre, with a multi-language descriptor rather than an English-only positioning, and are benchmarked against Star and Sony sports channels in Zee’s competitive set.

Zee Café SD/HD and &Flix SD/HD are being repurposed as two sports services, effectively giving Zee four sports channels at launch – two in SD and two in HD – without having to build a fresh footprint from scratch.

Zee Café and &Flix: end of a linear run

BestMediaInfo.com had flagged the structural decline of English entertainment television years ago.

In a 2020 commentary, industry estimates cited the genre losing over 60 per cent of viewership and 90 per cent of subscribers, with advertising revenue down over 75 per cent after the tariff reset and ad rates dropping sharply.

Zee Café remained one of the legacy English entertainment brands that continued operations despite the genre’s shrinking economics.

Once the distribution and ad math weakens to this level, the question is not “why exit”, but “why fund it”.

Sports, even in its non-cricket form, offers Zee a more saleable proposition in the current ad market, built on appointment viewing, sponsorship inventory and repeatable event-led programming, rather than expensive international fiction libraries.

Zee’s sports play

The timing also fits a wider correction cycle in sports media rights, which BestMediaInfo.com has been tracking as the cricket rights bubble began catching up with broadcaster balance sheets.

In December 2025, BestMediaInfo.com noted that Star India’s valuation fell 75 per cent in seven years and argued that media rights costs would need to come down heavily, potentially by at least 50 per cent over time, as deep-pocketed bidding pressure eases.

That analysis also cited JioStar’s standalone net loss of Rs 12,548 crore for the year ended March 31, 2024, including an Rs 12,319 crore provision linked to an “onerous contract” on ICC rights, effectively acknowledging the deal was commercially unsustainable at that price.

Zee also sits inside the same ICC rights timeline. In early 2024, Star had a television sublicensing arrangement with Zee for ICC men’s and Under-19 events, aimed at de-risking the linear TV side. The deal collapsed, and the matter moved into arbitration. JioStar has since raised its damages claim to over $1 billion.

With many in the industry expecting a reset in sports rights pricing, Zee appears to be building sports capacity ahead of the next round of negotiations and auctions.

“If the bubble is deflating, the best time to expand sports capacity is before the next set of renegotiations and auctions reset pricing expectations across the ecosystem,” a senior industry analyst said.