Madhukar Pandey, former business head, RBNL to start internet radio channel

Pandey was roped in by RBNL in November, 2011. He quit from the organisation about a month back and will start his own venture.

Madhukar Pandey, business head, central India cluster, Reliance Broadcast Network quit about a month ago. It is learnt that he plans to start his own internet radio channel, Radiowhiskey.in. The channel will have a mix of Indian and international music, categorised by the team as 'popular music'. The tagline of the channel is set to be 'Nasha music ka'.

The start up is in the testing phase and the channel is expected to be launched after a fortnight. Currently, the team is working to develop the interface, and plan the packaging and exact programming for the channel.

Radiowhiskey.in will be an internet radio channel and will have a single global feed. The channel will be more interactive, claims the company, and will showcase Now, Next and Later tabs, too.

It will draw revenue mainly from audio pop-up advertisements and audio commercials. For a better experience, the channel plans to have a shorter ad inventory of about two minutes per hour.

Confirming his move to afaqs!, Pandey says, "I wanted to start something of my own. To whoever have I shared this channel's information with, the response has been really positive. Currently we are not focusing on ads much but later on, once we have substantial number of visits on the site, we will."

Pandey, who is a computer applications graduate from the Lucknow Christian PG College and holds a PGDBA, has about 15 years of experience.

He started his career in IT education and served organisations such as NIIT, CMC and Informatics in various capacities. Later, he made a transition into the life insurance space and spent more than seven years working with leading insurers such as ICICI Prudential Life Insurance, HDFC Standard Life and MetLife Insurance as manager.

He joined ICICI Prudential Life Insurance as unit manager and was later promoted as sales manager. He then moved to HDFC Standard Life as branch manager. At HDFC, he was promoted as territory manager and set up offices for the organisation in seven districts across the state.

Pandey was instrumental in helping MetLife Insurance establish its business. His responsibility included hiring associates, setting up offices and establishing compliance, ethics, business practices and processes in UP from scratch. Later, in 2011, he joined RBNL as business head, central India cluster. His responsibilities included Big Magic and 11 stations of Big FM.