Sameer Nair quits Imagine

Within a month of Viacom 18's GEC channel Colors losing its CEO Rajesh Kamat, Turner General Entertainment Network's (TGEN) GEC channel Imagine has lost its CEO Sameer Nair.

After Nair's exit, Imagine's operations will be fully integrated into Turner Broadcasting System Asia Pacific (TBSAP). Steve Marcopoto, president of TBSAP, said, "While Imagine has enjoyed some significant successes in distinctive programming and built a solid audience base for a young channel in an extremely competitive genre, we need to improve the channel's overall performance and best position it for sustainable long-term growth."

"Sameer and I agree that the best way to achieve this end is for him to move on and merge the entertainment work TGEN with TBSAP," Marcopoto added. 

Nair in his statement said, "It's been an incredible entrepreneurial experience for me these past four years, building a brand and team Imagine and competing in the market place."

A peek into Nair's career makes one realizes he has had a rather circuitous career journey, having traversed various paths including selling space in Yellow Pages, working for a Chennai-based ad agency, Gold Wire, having a go at cinema as an independent filmmaker to finally being one of the most influential persons in the Indian television entertainment space.

His tryst with television started in 1994 with Star TV, where he began as a director-producer for Star Movies, Star's English movie channel. Nair's job was essentially to create snippets of content revolving around Bollywood personalities, including interviews, behind-the-scenes and on-location shoots. From here on, Nair steadily moved up the ladder within Star. He was first moved into the main programming team and then was made head of on-air promos for Star Plus. In 1999, Nair went on to become head of programming for Star Plus, which was then lagging far behind Zee TV and Sony.

It was the year 2000 that turned around both Star as well as Nair's career fortunes. This was the year when Indian television saw one of the most dramatic audience-gathering strategies being undertaken by Nair and Star. Nair unveiled the entry of superstar Amitabh Bachchan to television as the host of quiz show Kaun Banega Crorepati, the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire.

Overnight, Amitabh Bachchan's charisma turned the fortunes of the Star Network around, catapulting Star Plus from No.3 straight to No. 1. Having got the audiences glued to TV at 9 every night of the week, Nair followed it up with a flurry of family dramas (now famous as the "K serials"). Thereafter, the channel was the market leader for nine long years until the monopoly was broken by Colors, the Hindi GEC from the Viacom 18 stable.

In 2002, Nair was promoted to COO of Star India. In a matter of six months, Nair ramped up Star's distribution from 5.4 million subscriptions to over 10.7 million then.  Nair was also instrumental in launching Star Gold, Star's Hindi movie channel, and the purchase of Vijay TV, Star's Tamil channel, and Star One, its second Hindi GEC channel. He also helped the group regain operational control of Channel V.

However, after 13 years, Nair quit Star India as its CEO to join NDTV's new joint venture with Karan Johar's Dharma Productions as CEO. As part of this JV, he was instrumental in launching NDTV Imagine, the Hindi GEC in November 2007. After two years of its launch, NDTV Imagine was acquired by Time Warner's Turner Asia Pacific Ventures, which bought 92 per cent stake for $126.5 million.

All attempts to reach out to Nair, proved futile. One will only have to wait and watch what's going to be Nair's next game changing move.