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ZEE5 announces new original ‘Jaanbaaz Hindustan Ke’

Produced by Juggernaut and helmed by director Srijit Mukherji, Jaanbaaz Hindustan Ke focusses on a woman IPS officer, and is set in Meghalaya
ZEE5 announces new original ‘Jaanbaaz Hindustan Ke’
Jaanbaaz Hindustan Ke is a crime thriller with Regina Cassandra in the lead role.

Last Updated: 04.06 PM, Jan 10, 2023

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New Delhi: ZEE5, the video streaming platform owned by Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd, has announced the premiere of Jaanbaaz Hindustan Ke, a crime thriller with Regina Cassandra in the lead role.

Produced by Juggernaut and helmed by director Srijit Mukherji, Jaanbaaz Hindustan Ke focusses on a woman IPS officer, and is set in Meghalaya. The show will premiere on the platform in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu.

“At ZEE5, we believe in narrating stories that are real and relevant which connect with Indians. As a consumer-first brand, we are continuously working towards putting forth a diversified content slate that transcends cultures, geographies, languages, and this is just another step in that direction,” Manish Kalra, chief business officer, ZEE5 India said in a statement.

Video streaming services were expected to have spent around Rs. 1,920 crore to create original content for India in 2021, a 17% rise over Rs. 1,400 crore spent in 2019. This comes after the services had seen a sharp rise in audiences during the 2020 lockdown.

The platforms will increase spends, including on sports, to Rs. 30,000 crore during 2021-25, according to the latest Ficci-EY media and entertainment industry report. The investment in original content makes sense given that viewers are learning to pay for the content they consume. In 2020, 29 million subscribers paid for 53 million OTT video subscriptions (not counting subscriptions bundled along with data plans), a figure that is estimated to have risen to 39 million subscribers for 71 million subscriptions in 2021.

Surging viewership of streaming platforms during the two years of the pandemic has helped double the income of actors playing big roles in web shows and take up the wage bills to 50% of production costs at streaming services from less than 10% pre-pandemic, industry experts said.

While the total cost of producing originals has risen over the same period, actors have been the biggest gainers, with foreign streaming firms such as Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+ Hotstar happy to shell out big bucks to engaged faces now popular on web shows.

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