Essel's Living Entertainment to launch Living Foodz channel

The channel, launching on September 11, aims to explore different perspectives towards food, covering lifestyle, travel, wellness, food infotainment and reality.

Essel Group's Living Entertainment has announced the launch of its 'food-tainment' channel that will specialise in exploring the evolving social status of food. Living Foodz will be launched a day after Zee Khana Khazana sees its final run on September 10.

The channel claims that it will focus more on the experiential aspects of food and lifestyle programming, a value-add over the regular in-studio cooking and recipe format. It will be available across all DTH platforms and leading cable networks. It will have a Hindi and English feed.

Living Entertainment, part of the cognitive entertainment space, active in international markets for the last four years, marks the foray of Essel Group's Living Network in India. Living Foodz aspires for a universal look and feel, aimed to appeal to the new-age Indian.

The channel is targetted at both men and women across all age groups in urban digital households. The core audience set would comprise well-travelled, globally connected people. The channel has planned a number of food expedition shows with chefs like such as Brar, Gautam Mehrishi, Vicky Ratnani and 'foodie personalities' like Rocky and Mayur, among others.

Dr. Subhash Chandra, chairman, ZEEL and Essel Group, says, "As a group, we were beaming across 170 countries and hitting just 10 million short of 1 billion eyeballs in the overseas market. So, in 2008-09, when we thought about the next step in becoming a global network, the obvious choice was to compete with existing international networks, but we, instead, decided to dip into our own ancient knowledge which advocated a healthy natural way of life, and that is how Zee Living was born. We launched four years ago in US and later in some more English speaking territories. We are very proud to present Living Networks in India. This is yet another endeavour from our group to bring the world closer through entertainment. Living is all about global mindsets and experiences."

Elaborating on the idea behind Living Foodz, Punit Goenka, managing director and CEO, ZEEL, says, "We realised that food comprised a majority component in online search. With that thought, we aimed to do something with a global connect in the food and lifestyle sphere for our audience."

As for the content, the team says, about 80 per cent of the shows will be produced here and 20 per cent will be brought in from the international library. The international content will be dubbed in Hindi for the dual feed.

Commenting on the occasion, Piyush Sharma, CEO, Zee Living- India APAC, says, "Growth of digitisation is leading to fragmentation of audiences, thereby creating an opportunity for differentiated and genre specific content. Moreover, increasing digital households are giving rise to increased audience expectations and demand for more diverse viewing opportunities. Under this scenario, we are providing Living Foodz to people who love exploring and knowing more about food."

Rajiv Kheror, president, Strategy and Planning, International Business, says, "Audiences across the globe want to enjoy and understand food like never before. Your thirst for food-tainment is about to be quenched with Living Foodz."

Living Entertainment will be launching four more brands under the 'Living' umbrella within the next two years. These include Living Travelz and Living Rootz.