James Murdoch’s enterprise fund Bodhi Tree slashed its deliberate funding into Viacom18 to $528 million, down 70% from the dedicated $1.78 billion, the 2 stated late Thursday as the worldwide weakening financial system hammers traders’ urge for food.
Viacom18, a three way partnership between Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance and Paramount International, didn’t say why Bodhi Tree slashed its pledged funding. The deliberate funding was initially scheduled to shut by October final 12 months, in accordance with an earlier assertion.
Murdoch introduced Bodhi Tree together with his long-time collaborator Uday Shankar final 12 months. Qatar Funding Authority, the sovereign wealth fund of the State of Qatar, is the biggest investor in Bodhi Tree. Bodhi Tree pledged an funding of $1.78 billion into Viacom18 within the fund’s maiden backing in April final 12 months.
Reliance stated in an announcement that it’s contributing $1.32 billion to Viacom18.
“The partnership will allow Viacom 18 to innovate and disrupt the M&E sector, with Uday Shankar and James Murdoch offering strategic and operational steerage to Viacom 18, leveraging their track-record of constructing iconic media companies. Uday Shankar has been appointed to the Board of Viacom18,” Reliance stated in an announcement.
As a part of the funding, Viacom18 stated final 12 months that it’ll supercharge JioCinema, an on-demand video streaming service owned by telecom large Jio Platforms. Reliance and Viacom18 have made the streaming of IPL cricket match free to anybody with an web connection in India in a push to courtroom clients away from Disney, whose Hotstar app received over 50 million subscribers on the again of untamed reputation of cricket content material.
Viacom18 – a enterprise between Ambani’s Reliance and Paramount – just lately outbid Disney to safe 5 years of IPL’s streaming rights for the Indian subcontinent area with a sum of $3 billion.
In a joint assertion, Murdoch and Shankar stated final 12 months that they search to “reshape the leisure expertise throughout greater than 1 billion screens.”
The duo earlier ran a fund referred to as Lupa that invested in quite a lot of Indian startups together with short-video platform and information aggregator DailyHunt and edtech DoubtNut.
Shankar started working with Murdoch when he was overseeing Information Corp’s Asia enterprise within the late-2000. The Indian entrepreneur left Disney in late 2020 after spending two years as its president for the Asia-Pacific area and chairman of its India operations.
He helped the struggling Indian tv community in 2007 into changing into one of many nation’s largest media teams. Alongside Ajit Mohan, who has since moved to the management place for Snap in Asia, the duo helped the agency enter the streaming enterprise with Hotstar, which has since amassed a whole lot of tens of millions of customers and is a crown jewel in Disney’s streaming play.
