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Waves 2025 Brings Big Deals and Bold Dreams to India’s Media Sector

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MUMBAI: If the Indian media sector were a movie, Waves 2025 would be the montage sequence fast cuts of big money, bold ideas and breakout talent all coming together for a dramatic makeover. Held in Mumbai, the Waves Summit 2025 saw the Government of Maharashtra sign MoUs worth nearly Rs 8,000 crore, giving the media and entertainment sector a starring role in the state’s growth narrative. Among the headliners:

. Rs 3,000 crore from Prime Focus to build a 200-acre Film City

Rs 2,000 crore from Godrej for a film, TV and media campus in Panvel

.  Rs 1,500 crore each from the University of York and the University of Western Australia to set up their first Indian campuses in Mumbai

And just like that, education and entertainment are sharing billing on the marquee.

Waves 2025 also introduced the Nifty Waves Index, listing 43 media and entertainment companies finally giving the sector its own Sensex-style snapshot. Meanwhile, the Indian Institute of Creative Technology (IICT) inked partnerships with industry giants including Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Adobe, Nvidia, and Toon Boom, rolling out opportunities for scholarships, internships, rendering parks, game design courses and creative entrepreneurship.

Waves Bazaar cemented its role as the sector’s B2B-B2G power corridor. Launched in January 2025, the digital-first marketplace has already hosted 2,450 projects, with 6,442 buyers and 6,106 sellers participating across film, animation, XR, gaming and advertising verticals. It’s India’s global swipe-right moment for creative deals.

Elsewhere, WaveX turned into a high-stakes pitch fest where creative dreams met venture capital muscle. From 1,504 applicants, 30 high-potential M&E startups in gaming, storytelling, immersive tech and the creator economy pitched live to 29 marquee investors including Lumikai, Jio, and Warmup Ventures. With 127 startups securing connections or partnerships, and applications vetted by IAMAI and KPMG, this wasn’t just razzle, it was rigor with returns.  

Enter the Create in India Challenge, a flagship talent hunt that hosted 34 creative contests across animation, AR/VR, gaming, music and films. Finalists competed in the buzzing Creatosphere, a zone dedicated to next-gen creators. Eight expert masterclasses helped sharpen their edge, while the finals turned the stage into a launchpad.

Not to be left out, Waves Culturals gave attendees a feel of India’s artistic pulse through performances blending traditional and global forms. The event’s heart, however, was the Bharat Pavilion, inaugurated by prime minister Narendra Modi on 1 May 2025. Designed as an immersive tribute to India’s storytelling roots, it showcased four thematic zones Shruti (oral traditions), Kriti (written heritage), Drishti (visual storytelling), and Creator’s Leap (future tech).

Over in the FM lane, the 8th National Community Radio Conference saw 12 CR stations receive national awards for innovation and inclusivity. With 531 CR stations and over 400 representatives attending, it was a mic-drop moment for grassroots broadcasters.

Add to that the launch of the first Indian Film Festival in New Zealand and fresh Indo-UK film collaborations and you’ve got an M&E summit that doesn’t just talk global, it screens it.

From classroom tie-ups to cultural showcases, and from startup pitches to mega MoUs, Waves 2025 didn’t just imagine India as a global creative powerhouse it laid down the blueprint, cast the crew and started shooting.

And with Maharashtra calling action on infrastructure, investment and innovation India’s media industry is no longer just watching the story unfold. It’s writing the script.
 

MAM

Nielsen launches co-viewing pilot to sharpen TV measurement

Super Bowl pilot to refine how shared TV audiences are counted

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MUMBAI: Nielsen is taking a fresh stab at one of television’s oldest blind spots: how many people are actually watching the same screen. The audience-measurement giant on February 4 unveiled a co-viewing pilot that uses wearable devices to better capture shared viewing, starting with America’s biggest broadcast stage.

The trial begins with Super Bowl LX on NBC on February 8, 2026, before extending to other high-profile live sports and entertainment events in the first half of the year. The goal is simple but commercially potent: count viewers more accurately, especially during live spectacles that pull families and friends to one screen.

The new approach leans on Nielsen’s proprietary wearable meters, wrist-worn devices that resemble smartwatches. These passively capture audio signatures from TV content, logging exposure to shows, films and live events without requiring viewers to sign in or self-report. In theory, fewer clicks, fewer lapses, better data.

Karthik Rao, Nielsen’s ceo, cast the move as part of a broader measurement push. He said the company’s task is to keep pushing accuracy as clients invest heavily in live programming that draws mass audiences. The co-viewing pilot, he added, builds on upgrades such as Big Data + Panel measurement, out-of-home expansion, live-streaming metrics and wearable-based tracking.

Co-viewing is not new territory for Nielsen, which has long tried to estimate how many people sit before a single set. What is new is the heavier integration of wearables and passive detection to reduce reliance on active inputs from panel homes.

For now, the pilot comes with caveats. Co-viewing estimates from the trial will not be folded into Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel ratings, which remain the industry’s trading currency. Instead, pilot findings will be shared with clients a few weeks after final Big Data + Panel ratings are delivered. Clients may disclose those findings publicly.

More impact data will follow later this year. Full integration into Nielsen’s marketing-intelligence suite is slated as a longer-term play, with a target of bringing co-viewing into currency measurement for the 2026–2027 season. This is only phase one, with further co-viewing enhancements planned beyond 2026 and additional timelines to be announced.

The push fits a wider pattern. Nielsen has in recent years expanded big-data integration, adopted first-party data for live-streaming measurement and broadened out-of-home tracking. It also positions itself as the reference point for streaming metrics through products such as The Gauge and the Nielsen Streaming Top 10.

In a market where billions of ad dollars hinge on decimal points, counting who is in the room matters. If Nielsen can pin down shared viewing, the humble sofa could become prime measurement real estate. The race to count every eyeball just found a new wrist to watch.

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Delhivery chairman Deepak Kapoor, independent director Saugata Gupta quit board

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Gurugram: Delhivery’s boardroom is being reset. Deepak Kapoor, chairman and independent director, has resigned with effect from April 1 as part of a planned board reconstitution, the logistics company said in an exchange filing. Saugata Gupta, managing director and chief executive of FMCG major Marico and an independent director on Delhivery’s board, has also stepped down.

Kapoor exits after an eight-year stint that included steering the company through its 2022 stock-market debut, a period that saw Delhivery transform from a venture-backed upstart into one of India’s most visible logistics platforms. Gupta, who joined the board in 2021, departs alongside him, marking a simultaneous clearing of two senior independent seats.

“Deepak and Saugata have been instrumental in our process of recognising the need for and enabling the reconstitution of the board of directors in line with our ambitious next phase of growth,” said Sahil Barua, managing director and chief executive, Delhivery. The statement frames the exits less as departures and more as deliberate succession, a boardroom shuffle timed to the company’s evolving scale and strategy.

The resignations arrive amid broader governance recalibration. In 2025, Delhivery appointed Emcure Pharmaceuticals whole-time director Namita Thapar, PB Fintech founder and chairman Yashish Dahiya, and IIM Bangalore faculty member Padmini Srinivasan as independent directors, signalling a tilt towards consumer, fintech and academic expertise at the board level.

Kapoor’s tenure spanned Delhivery’s most defining years, rapid network expansion, public listing and the push towards profitability in a bruising logistics market. Gupta’s presence brought FMCG and brand-scale perspective during a period when ecommerce volumes and last-mile delivery economics were being rewritten.

The twin exits, effective from the new financial year, underscore a familiar corporate rhythm: founders consolidate, veterans rotate out, and fresh voices are ushered in to script the next chapter. In India’s hyper-competitive logistics race, even the boardroom does not stand still.

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Meta appoints Anuvrat Rao as APAC head of commerce partnerships

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SINGAPORE: Anuvrat Rao has taken charge as APAC  head of commerce and signals partnerships at Meta, steering monetisation deals across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp from Singapore. The former Google executive, known for launching Google Assistant, PWAs, AMP and Firebase across Asia-Pacific, steps into the role after a high-growth stint as chief business officer at Locofy.ai.

At Locofy.ai, Rao helped convert a three-year free beta into a paid engine, clocking 1,000 subscribers and 15 enterprise clients within ten days of launch in September 2024. The low-code startup, backed by Accel and top tech founders, is famed for turning designs into production-ready code using proprietary large design models.

Before that, Rao founded generative AI venture 1Bstories, which was acquired by creative AI platform Laetro in mid-2024, where he briefly served as managing director for APAC. Alongside operating roles, he has been an active investor and advisor since 2020, backing startups such as BotMD, Muxy, Creator plus, Intellect, Sealed and CricFlex through a creator-economy-led thesis.

Rao spent over eight years at Google, holding senior partnership roles across search, assistant, chrome, web and YouTube in APAC, and earlier cut his teeth in strategy consulting at OC&C in London and investment finance at W. P. Carey in Europe and the US.

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