Maybe 7 could partner with Netflix at some stage?
Or even be bought by Netflix? I think it’s only a matter of time before they end up buying a legacy station somewhere. It could be a win win. The channel could show Netflix content and it would be an easy way of meeting local content quotas.
At risk of going off topic, NETFLIX NEWS AT SIX 
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Given I am from Mexico, I would like to bring context: Caliente TV was an attempt from my country’s leading sports betting firm to launch a new player in the Mexican sports TV industry; it was something of a new experience from the betting giant, which already owns a few Mexican Soccer League teams. After a test period, the channel launched as a streaming channel on YouTube in September 2023, but the following year they bought rights to the French Ligue 1 and Wednesday matches from the UEFA Champions League, as well as taking the rights to the Caliente-owned teams in-house.
With that said, they launched a streaming platform when they started airing their new football rights, which were marred by reliability issues and the quality of their game broadcasts, including airing games with no play-by-play commentary. After offering the service as a free preview during the last few months of the season, the company finally released their subscription product, but the problems were not resolved and they reportedly lost millions of dollars in subscription revenue; a last ditch attempt to get the situation under control was making a deal with Prime Video to distribute the service inside their platform as a standalone channel offering.
At the same time, Fox had started litigation against Fox Sports Mexico, which currently licenses the Fox brand from the Murdoch company, is at the brink of collapse and has amassed enormous debts and losses of major rights. It is a messy context and situation that is better detailed in this article:
The litigation between Fox and Lauman has since been resolved. Over time, Fox’s channel on Tubi became more organized, with a more tight schedule and a 24/7 channel, plus an alternate channel availability in the case of schedule conflicts.
That is why Fox, with their vast resources, has taken over a failing sports network and is trying to take on a failing sports network.
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Hello everyone! I’ve been following this forum for the last few months for major international (non-Australian) TV rebrands, and I think it’s time to post something from my native country, India.
I’m rather late on this one, because this megarebrand took place on the evening of 7 June, but then I got so busy with life that I forgot to post this here… until now. This is going to be a very long post, given the massive scale of this rebrand, so please bear with me!
The big news is that Zee, one of India’s biggest media companies, dropped its 8-year-old circular Zee symbol (which was launched in October 2017) and introduced a thin, flat Z as its corporate symbol. The corporate entity introduced the logo on 17 May, and most of Zee’s 70+ TV channels in a dozen languages — in India we count SD and HD feeds of the same channel separately — changed their logos on 7 June at 8:30 p.m. India time (1 a.m. AEST) simultaneously.
The flagship channel is Zee TV in Hindi, and then there are many more in regional languages, like Zee Tamil, Zee Telugu, etc. There are multiple channels in each regional language for entertainment, movies and occasionally lifestyle and music. There are also some channels that use a sub-brand called &, and these are mostly movie channels, like &pictures and &flix. They also adopted a similar new logo scheme.
Moreover, most of the Zee and & channels placed their logos in the top left corner of the screen (very rare in India) before the rebrand — but that is no longer the case. All of them moved their logos to the top right corner, which is the standard in India, with this megarebrand.
Zee also operates multiple international channels: both foreign feeds of its local Indian channels for the Indian diaspora, and locally tailored channels with Indian content across the Americas, Africa and Asia — especially Africa. All of them rebranded simultaneously. There’s nothing in Australia, though, from what I understand.
At the corporate level, Zee introduced a brand campaign called Yours Truly, Z (or Aapka Apna Zee in Hindi), with brand films in each of the country’s 10 or so languages promoting India’s rich storytelling heritage. Here’s an example of the Hindi brand film, as Hindi is the largest of these languages, with more in regional languages.
Here’s an article that covers the megarebrand from the point of view of graphics packaging and branding. Most of the coverage of this rebrand has been on DreamDTH Forums, India’s equivalent of Media Spy.
https://dreamdth.com/zee-channels-undergo-megarebrand-with-new-logos-graphics-and-brand-films/
This YouTube channel has a good compilation of idents and bumpers regarding the rebrand. You will notice that all channels use some variant of a common 6-note jingle.
And this page is an overview of Zee’s corporate identity, with the template at the bottom listing all of Zee’s dozens of channels and other properties at a glance. For Australian and other global readers who may be bewildered at first glance by all the 70+ channels (even more if including news channels), plus the many international channels, this is a helpful summary.
On a global scale, this is comparable with the megarebrand of Poland’s biggest commercial broadcaster, Grupa Polsat Plus, in 2021 — in the sense that all channels use essentially the same graphics package with different colours, instead of having a unique graphics package for each channel.
Sony Pictures Networks India, another major (but much smaller) Indian broadcaster, underwent a similar megarebrand in October 2022, with a distinct, unique graphics package for each channel. (Zee and Sony were trying to merge, but the deal fell through in early 2024.) I do wish Zee had done that too, instead of copy-pasting the same graphics across all channels!
Also, it must be said that Zee has done a very poor job with the legibility of the logos on screen. The previous logos were nothing if not legible; the new ones are anything but legible, especially considering that most Indians watch channels in SD resolution and not HD. The Z often appears as just a slash, and the coloured text isn’t always clear either. Personally I like the old Zee logos much more, and I feel that the previous megarebrand in 2017 was very professionally executed, more than this one. But that’s just my opinion, after all.
But it’s clear that Zee wanted to break away from its previous brand image, which was battered by the failure of the merger with Sony, and position itself as a fierce competitor to JioStar. JioStar is India’s largest broadcaster that was formed in late 2024 by the merger of Disney-owned Star and Reliance (Mukesh Ambani)-owned Viacom18, operating over 100 channels. If nothing else, this megarebrand is a competitive response to that.
Hope you enjoyed reading, and while I may not post very frequently on this forum, I will still track this and the International News Presentation thread for important rebrand-related news!
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RTL will fully acquire Sky’s businesses in Germany, Austria and Switzerland incorporating Sky’s sports and entertainment. Under a separate trademark license agreement, RTL will have the right to use the Sky brand in the DACH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland), Luxembourg, Liechtenstein and South Tyrol. RTL will acquire Sky Deutschland’s streaming brand WOW as part of the transaction.
The Sky transaction has now been approved by the RTL board and will be subject to regulatory approvals. Sky still runs operations in the UK and Italy.
UPDATE
Dutch regulators have approved the sale of RTL Nederland to DPG Media.
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Vietnamese television is now entering another major change, this time at the local level. Following the merger of provinces and the implementation of two-level administrative units starting from July 1, some provincial television broadcasters would: (1) cease their operations; and (2) consolidate their activities into the newly formed province. As for some broadcasters that have yet to end their operations or consolidate with the broadcaster of the new province, they would continue their activities, but with reduced personnel and programming until the final decision from the national government and/or new local administrators.
(*) Footages of the changes in some local Vietnamese TV broadcasters can be seen here, livestreamed from around 22:20 to 00:20 (Indochina Time), June 30 - July 1, 2025
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Following TF1’s deal with Netflix last month, France Télévisions has signed its own agreement with Prime Video, which see France.tv subscription platform launching on Prime yesterday, ahead of the 2025 Tour de France.
Interesting i just found out they have a Canadian version of Merit TV. It appears to be ran by MCA Media Group (similar to ACCTV). It appears to have started in January and possibly just a time shifted version of the US channel.
Also i can’t remember if it was mentioned before but Merit lost the rights to broadcast PBR due to contract payment issues:
Also needs to have a certain amount of Canadian content. So the time shift might be to accommodate that.
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