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Tag: Gobble

  • Saregama snaps up more of Pocket Aces, goes all in on youth initiative

    Saregama snaps up more of Pocket Aces, goes all in on youth initiative

    MUMBAI: Saregama has snapped up a further 36.63 per cent of Pocket Aces for a cool Rs 127.47 crore. This latest splurge, a second tranche if you will, pushes Saregama’s ownership to a dominant 90.37 per cent, leaving little room for anyone else at the digital buffet.

    The deal, finalised on 29 March  2025, sees Saregama hoovering up a veritable smorgasbord of shares, from equity to an array of convertible preference shares. Pocket Aces, boasting a digital empire of 175 million followers across its FilterCopy, Dice Media, Nutshell and Gobble channels, and a talent roster of over 215 influencers via Clout, is now firmly under Saregama’s wing. The company declared this to the BSE through a regulatory filing on Saturday. 

    Pocket Aces, with a back catalogue of over 35,000 content pieces, from digital originals  to those ubiquitous reels, is a digital goldmine for Saregama, keen to woo the 18-35 demographic.

    Pocket Aces’ financials reveal a turnover of Rs 8859.17 lakhs for FY 24, a slight dip from the previous year’s Rs 10267.93 lakhs, but Saregama is betting on synergies, not just spreadsheets. The acquisition, which includes a related party transaction with a Pocket Aces director – all done “at arm’s length”, naturally – is being touted as a strategic masterstroke.

    “This isn’t just about owning content; it’s about owning the conversation,” an industry observer chirped, with the knowledge that  Pocket Aces’ vast network can be used by Saregama to turbocharge its music library.

    With influencers, long-form content, and snackable reels all under one roof, Saregama is clearly aiming to be the king of the digital jungle.

  • Gobble and Tourism Australia Unite for a mini-series

    Gobble and Tourism Australia Unite for a mini-series

    Mumbai: Gobble and Tourism Australia have announced a collaboration on a new travel series, Unravel Australia, hosted by actor Ayush Mehra. This five-part mini series, now live on YouTube, takes viewers on an immersive journey through Australia’s stunning landscapes and uniquely Australian experiences.

    Each 8–10-minute episode of Unravel Australia offers a comprehensive look at Australia’s best kept secrets and unmissable experiences. Living his dream of exploring the ‘Land Down Under’, Ayush surfs the waves of Sydney’s Bondi Beach, explores the stunning depths of the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland, visits the iconic Melbourne Cricket Ground, gets up close and personal with kangaroos and koalas at Ballarat Wildlife Park in Victoria, sandboards down dunes in Port Stephens in New South Wales, and samples world class food and drink experiences with the celebrated Australian chef and TV personality, Andy Allen.

    Gobble’s innovative approach to delivering entertaining and meaningful content aligns with Tourism Australia’s mission to showcase the unique and unforgettable experiences that the destination has to offer Indian travellers. By combining Ayush Mehra’s engaging storytelling with the visually captivating and diverse landscapes of Australia, Unravel Australia is set to be a feast for the senses.

    Pocket Aces D2C head, Vishwanath Shetty expressed, “At Pocket Aces, we are constantly striving to create content that entertains and enriches the viewer’s experience. ‘Unravel Australia’ is a perfect example of how storytelling and visual exploration can come together to showcase a country’s cultural and natural wonders. Ayush’s enthusiasm and passion for exploration, combined with the breathtaking visuals of Australia, will undoubtedly captivate our audience. We’re proud to collaborate with Tourism Australia on this project and look forward to bringing more such exciting content to our viewers.”

    Commenting on the new series, Tourism Australia  Country Manager – India & Gulf Nishant Kashikar said, “Our key objective of the partnership with Pocket Aces and their channel Gobble was to make Australia the destination of choice for their premium audience who are seeking holiday inspiration. Australia has something for every type of traveller – from stunning landscapes and vibrant cities, to world-class cuisine, and unique wildlife experiences that are enjoyable all year round. The new series is just a glimpse into the diversity of tourism experiences that Australia has to offer.”

    “Being a part of ‘Unravel Australia’ has been nothing short of a magical adventure, all thanks to Gobble. Australia’s Southeast Coast is a treasure trove of stunning landscapes, vibrant cities, and rich culture, and I’m thrilled to be able to share these experiences with viewers back home. Every moment of this journey has been an adventure, from the thrill of surfing the waves to the serene beauty of the forests. I hope this series inspires people to explore Australia and experience the wonder of ‘The Land Down Under’ themselves,” said Ayush Mehra.

  • Saregama acquires majority stake in Pocket Aces

    Saregama acquires majority stake in Pocket Aces

    Mumbai: A new chapter in Saregama’s growth story commences with a majority acquisition in a fast-growing digital entertainment company Pocket Aces Pictures Pvt Ltd, that owns direct relationships with over 95M younger digital-first customers across Instagram, YouTube, etc. Saregama will acquire 51.8 per cent shares for Rs  174 crores with a clear path to further acquire another 41 per cent stake in the next 15 months at pre-agreed multiples. The transaction is an all-cash deal.

    This acquisition will further strengthen Saregama’s strategic ambiton to take leadership position in new music across all Indian languages.  

    Pocket Aces, a youth-focussed digital content creator and publisher, boasts of an IP catalog of over 3000  content pieces ranging across web series, sketches, music videos and reels on its channels FilterCopy, Nutshell and Gobble, and releases over 30 new pieces of content every day. The company’s talent management arm, Clout, manages over 100 digital influencers, and its long-form studio, Dice Media, has created relatable youth-centric web series across OTT platforms such as Netflix, Hotstar, and Amazon.

    Pocket Aces’ revenue from operations was Rs 104 cr in FY23. Revenue has grown by 34 per cent CAGR over the last 4 years and is expected to grow even faster in future.

    Acquiring Pocket Aces will add on a whole new dimension of IP and a distribution network of over 95 million followers, which Saregama will leverage to further popularize its music library among the 18-35 audience segment. It will also create synergies across the artiste & influencer management and long-format video creation businesses of the two companies.

    Saregama vice chairperson Avarna Jain said, “This acquisition signifies the confluence of tradition and innovation. While we have always been leaders in the realm of music and media, this partnership with Pocket  Aces will add new dimensions to our business as we tap into the burgeoning young digital audiences.”

     

  • Pocket Aces’ Gobble and DEWAR’S join hands for ‘You Got Chef’d’ season 3

    Pocket Aces’ Gobble and DEWAR’S join hands for ‘You Got Chef’d’ season 3

    Mumbai: Pocket Aces’ lifestyle channel, Gobble, in collaboration with DEWAR’S double aged Scotch Whisky by Bacardi, is back with the third season of “You Got Chef’d”.

    The latest season will have Bollywood celebs Arjun Kapoor, Tahira Kashyap, Pratik Gandhi, and Rohan Joshi, cooking their gourmet creations with chef and host Ranveer Brar, the channel said. Under the supervision of DEWAR’S India brand ambassadors, Greg Benson and Myles Carroll, the guests will be challenged to try bartending tricks that boost their chances of winning, it added.

    “You Got Chef’d! helps bring out the finest cocktail and food pairings alongside fun banter and highlights the amazing occasions at home and otherwise to experience with DEWAR’S,” Bacardi India’s consumer marketing lead-Whiskies, Vijay Dev said. “We hope consumers enjoy this season as well and try their hand at these easy-to-make DEWAR’S Highball cocktails.”

    DEWAR’S brand ambassador-India Greg Benson shared, “As DEWAR’S continues to champion innovative Scotch whisky highball cocktail experiences for consumers across the world, You Got Chef’d will further enable the brand in doing so. Especially, at a time when consumers are actively seeking to experiment with easy-to-make cocktails at home, we will help them take their Highball cocktail experiences a notch higher through the show. Furthermore, with Chef Brar as my co-host for the second consecutive season, I am elated as the two of us together effortlessly bring out the Double is Better spirit.”

    “Thanks to our unique offerings, viewers are hooked to Gobble for lifestyle content, resulting in our audience base having tripled over the last two years. After the success of the previous two seasons, we decided to push the boundaries and make our guests attempt more difficult cuisines in this season,” Gobble channel manager Ankit Chhabra shared. “The idea was to have our viewers experience global culture from the comfort of their homes. It is going to be super fun to watch the audiences’ favorite celebrities putting their culinary and bartending skills to test. We could not have been happier with the lineup of this season.”

    “With every passing season, we have been able to widen the scale of the show in terms of production and viewership,” Pocket Aces’ VP-sales and brand solutions, Vishwanath Shetty said. “Dewar’s, our brand partner, has been on-board for three consecutive seasons for one of Gobble’s ‘Impact property’, making this our longest association with a brand for a given series. This goes to show the merit brands seek in our content and hence choose to associate themselves with it. We have been able to initiate conversations with potential brand partners, taking into account the strong backing of our previously successful associations. This also gives other brands an opportunity to visualise different ways in which they can integrate themselves into seamlessly flowing content like ours; furthermore, witness scale year-on-year.”

  • Pocket Aces sets foot into the travel space with its new web series ‘Love Travel Repeat’

    Pocket Aces sets foot into the travel space with its new web series ‘Love Travel Repeat’

    MUMBAI: Pocket Aces, India’s leading digital entertainment company, recently introduced an exciting new travel series, ‘Love Travel Repeat’ on its lifestyle channel, Gobble. With the launch of the new series, the company spreads its wings to set footprint into the travel space. In a first-of-its-kind partnership with Hyundai India, the series has 5 episodes featuring popular web actors Kriti Vij and Pranay Manchanda, as they embark on a road trip from Mumbai to Bengaluru. The first episode aired on 28th December on Gobble’s Facebook, YouTube and Instagram channels.

    Gobble has fast evolved since its inception to reach 60M+ monthly reach and 200M+ monthly views. A mainstream digital food content channel, Gobble had several successful award-winning food shows such as You Got Chef’d, Love vs. Food and more. However, the company decided to expand into the travel and home decor verticals, after noticing a clear gap for such content online. To herald this growth, Gobble underwent a rebranding – with a new snappy logo and establishing three new verticals – Gobble Travel, Gobble Food and Gobble Home. The company announced this change with a video depicting its evolution, and a promise of new exciting series coming up this year. ‘Love Travel Repeat’ is the first show from the new Gobble, where the couple’s adventures along the road trip are decided by the audiences’ suggestions received online. 

    Commenting on the new series, Sonalika Mehra, Gobble’s channel manager, said, “Over the last three years, Gobble has become a household name in the food space. As we created food-focused non-fiction content, we realised the gap that currently exists in India for digital lifestyle content. We plan to create over 6 series and several short video formats over the year to cater to and better understand the audience for home and travel content. Through this expansion, we also hope to partner with relevant brands to create fresh digital content in order to reach out to a wider demographic. We are kicking off the new Gobble with our first travel series, “Love Travel Repeat” where a real-life couple travels from Mumbai to Bangalore with their Hyundai Grand i10 NIOS as the third wheel on the journey.”

  • Pocket Aces partners Ola & Play

    MUMBAI: Pocket Aces, one of the country’s leading digital entertainment companies running channels FilterCopy, Dice Media and Gobble, has partnered with Ola, India’s most popular mobile app for transportation, to provide a wide range of digital content to Ola’s connected ridesharing platform, Ola Play.

    The premium content from Pocket Aces will include short videos from their flagship channel FilterCopy, hugely popular web series Little Things and Not Fit from Dice Media, and food videos from Gobble. Not Fit was also the first web series to play on television – it did three successful runs on NDTV Prime earlier this year.

    Pocket Aces co-founder Aditi Shrivastava said, “Our goal is to give our content and our brand partners as much reach as possible, and are in conversations with several global OTT players and television channels to syndicate our content. ”

    Ola Play sr. director & head Ankit Jain said, “The possibilities that Play offers allows us to discover and aggregate content as music, web series, discover apps and much more to be made available to customers at the push of a button. We are extremely excited to partner with Pocket Aces to enable Ola Play users’ access to high quality content.”

  • Dice Media unveils Little Things’ third episode

    Dice Media unveils Little Things’ third episode

    MUMBAI: Dice Media has released its third episode titled ‘Good Night’ of its new original web series, Little Things. The 5-episode romantic comedy web series beautifully portrays the little things in the life of an everyday couple starring Mithila Palkar, one of the most popular digital stars in India today, and the talented writer-actor Dhruv Sehgal. 

    Good Night unfolds the incident of a sleepless night of the duo. Thanks to the mosquitoes, this night turns into a discovery of Kavya’s ex-boyfriend getting married and a long conversation about exes follows. Every relationship has some sort of power struggle in it, and Dhruv and Kavya’s is no different.  Will Dhruv realize the importance of Kavya in his life? Watch the episode to find out how Dhruv and Kavya value each other’s existence in their lives.

    The 5-part series is directed by Ajay Bhuyan, written by Dhruv Sehgal, with music by Neel Adhikari. Little Things will release every Wednesday on Dice Media’s Facebook and YouTube pages. All the episodes can be watched at 

    Released on Oct 26, following is the stunning response received for the series so far: 

    · Episode 1 has already crossed 2.2 million views (>1.2 million on YT, >1 million on FB) with over 19k shares and 4,700 comments.

    · Episode 2, which released five days back, has already received 2 million views (~1 million on YT, >1 million on FB) with over 13k shares and 3,500 comments.

    Pocket Aces conceptualizes, creates, and distributes engaging original content for millennial audiences through its channels Dice Media (sketches and web-series), FilterCopy (sharable and snackable short-form content), and Gobble (everything food). 

    Dice has created several experimental and edgy pieces of content such as the satirical sketch, Ban Ban, India’s first mockumentary series Not Fit, and most recently, an absurd-humour sketch titled Offline.

  • Dice Media unveils Little Things’ third episode

    Dice Media unveils Little Things’ third episode

    MUMBAI: Dice Media has released its third episode titled ‘Good Night’ of its new original web series, Little Things. The 5-episode romantic comedy web series beautifully portrays the little things in the life of an everyday couple starring Mithila Palkar, one of the most popular digital stars in India today, and the talented writer-actor Dhruv Sehgal. 

    Good Night unfolds the incident of a sleepless night of the duo. Thanks to the mosquitoes, this night turns into a discovery of Kavya’s ex-boyfriend getting married and a long conversation about exes follows. Every relationship has some sort of power struggle in it, and Dhruv and Kavya’s is no different.  Will Dhruv realize the importance of Kavya in his life? Watch the episode to find out how Dhruv and Kavya value each other’s existence in their lives.

    The 5-part series is directed by Ajay Bhuyan, written by Dhruv Sehgal, with music by Neel Adhikari. Little Things will release every Wednesday on Dice Media’s Facebook and YouTube pages. All the episodes can be watched at 

    Released on Oct 26, following is the stunning response received for the series so far: 

    · Episode 1 has already crossed 2.2 million views (>1.2 million on YT, >1 million on FB) with over 19k shares and 4,700 comments.

    · Episode 2, which released five days back, has already received 2 million views (~1 million on YT, >1 million on FB) with over 13k shares and 3,500 comments.

    Pocket Aces conceptualizes, creates, and distributes engaging original content for millennial audiences through its channels Dice Media (sketches and web-series), FilterCopy (sharable and snackable short-form content), and Gobble (everything food). 

    Dice has created several experimental and edgy pieces of content such as the satirical sketch, Ban Ban, India’s first mockumentary series Not Fit, and most recently, an absurd-humour sketch titled Offline.