ITV Studios has appointed Kunal Shah to the role of Sales Director, South Asia, after spending five years at NBCUniversal.
At NBCUniveral, he worked as Director of Sales Liaison (South Asia), managing all content licensing of linear and digital within India and other South Asian regions for the studio and its affiliates.
Bringing with him a wealth of sales experience spanning 21 years in the industry, he will be based in Mumbai and report into Augustus Dulgaro, Executive Vice President – Distribution, Asia Pacific.
Dulgaro said: “ITV Studios’ Indian business has grown significantly over the last few years due to our excellent content and the strength of our client relationships on the ground. Kunal’s authority and depth of experience in the Indian market is a welcome addition to ITV Studios and I am delighted to welcome him to the APAC team.”
Shah said: “I’m absolutely delighted to be joining ITV Studios and looking forward to seeing what more we can do in India. ITV Studios has some great stories to tell and it’s really exciting. There’s a whole lot of scope to localise the content and grow the business on licensing too.”
He will be responsible for identifying new business opportunities and maximising the value of ITV Studios’ 46,000+ hour-strong catalogue of finished programming across the region. Shah will also be tasked with driving revenue across the tape and scripted formats business, whilst managing the end to end sales process for one of the world’s largest and fastest growing international distribution companies.
In his last role, he was instrumental in initiating a localisation project with Indian production companies to produce remakes of key shows and in 2018 he won an internal SharkTank Award at an APAC leadership summit.
As well as working for Times of India, Zee Network and Star India, he has spent time at various start-ups. Previously, he worked as General Manager – Content at Times Internet & The Times of India Group heading content acquisition & partnerships, further to launch ‘follo’, BoxTV, TOI App, and as Director & Country Business Head at Qtelmedia where he launched over 24 different Mobile TV Channels for ‘Du’ telecom across UAE.