| Turner International India (A WarnerMedia company)
Turner International India (A WarnerMedia company)
A small legal team comprising of highly motivated attorneys who oversee an array of legal, compliance, regulatory, corporate governance and risk management issues for the entire business in South Asia. The legal team, is structured like a law firm where each attorney has a set of internal clients. Shobhna Bajaj, executive director and senior counsel leads the legal department with over 20 years of experience having worked with the best media companies and leading law firms. She is an alumnus of University of Warwick, UK and Campus Law Centre, University of Delhi. She is also a fellow member of the Institute of Company Secretaries of India. She is responsible for (a) negotiating agreements with key clients for distribution, content and advertising sales (b) working with the business development teams on mergers and acquisitions (c) negotiating agreements for theme parks and other local based entertainment (d) working with the public policy team and industry bodies on various consultation process initiated by the various regulatory authorities; and (e) company secretarial compliance. Zurrat Zamal Kaur, senior manager and compliance officer, is a lawyer with about 11 years of experience and is responsible for broadcasting regulation compliance, linear distribution agreements, licensing and merchandising agreements, litigation and Intellectual property enforcement. She is an alumnus of Campus Law Centre, University of Delhi and a member of Bar Council of Delhi. Kim Dias, senior manager, is a lawyer with about 11 years of experience and is responsible for advertising sales transactions, non-linear distribution agreements, content acquisition and production agreements, marketing and promotion of our content. She is an alumnus of Government Law College, Mumbai.
Negotiating various agreements for distribution of television programming services “Cartoon Network”, “POGO”, “HBO”, ”WB”, “CNN International”, “Cartoon Network HD+” and “HBO HD” (Turner channels) with Amazon; Indiacast and TV 18, owned by Reliance Industries Limited; Airtel; and YouTube. Also, negotiating theme park agreements in Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, India and China. In addition, aggressively preventing intellectual property infringement by getting injunctions against an entity planning to launch a television channel with a name similar to that owned by Turner; taking down infringing content from rogue websites; and proceeding against those using Turner marks and characters on goods and services without authority.
In 2017, TRAI issued the Telecommunication (Broadcasting and Cable) Services (Eight) (Addressable Systems) Tariff Order, 2017 along with the Telecommunication (Broadcasting and Cable) Services Regulations, 2017 and the Telecommunication (Broadcasting and Cable) Services Standards of Quality of Service and Consumer Protection (Addressable Systems) Regulations, 2017 (Collectively the “Regulations”). After much delay and heavily fought litigation, the Regulations were brought into effect on 1 January 2019 which have had a significant economic impact. Demonetisation had a significant impact on distribution revenue, GST had significant implementation challenges and ensuring that South Asia business and online marketing and promotional efforts did not fall fowl of GDPR was
a great legal and compliance effort.
With the acquisition of the Time Warner Inc. by AT&T, the ultimate parent company of Turner India is now AT&T. As such, the coming 12 months would require a lot of focus and commitment towards successful integration of the teams and aligning our systems and processes with those of AT&T. We will also be assisting the business in navigating the changing dynamics within the broadcasting sector where the consumers are moving away from appointment viewing (as offered by television), to viewing content as and when they want on whichever screen they want. The legal team will also have to play an active role in implementation of The Personal Data Protection Bill 2018 as and when it is passed by the Parliament.
In order to minimise costs in an increasingly difficult business environment and to drive efficiencies in reducing the time taken to finalise standard and not heavily negotiated agreements, we have implemented an automated contract generation program. In the coming months we will be training business users in using this tool and will also be introducing an option to choose alternative clauses. This would free up lawyers to prioritise high risk, complex, high value transactions and non-standard work. This would also allow contracts to be tracked against internal criteria to check if they adhere to standard risk profiles. Implemented a digital rights management software where we have created a database of all the content owner or licensed by Turner in various territories and distribution platforms. This enables the business users to identify time period, territories and distribution platforms where a particular content is still available for monetization. Lastly, we moved to digital contract verification and execution wherever possible.
Ethics, integrity and collaboration underpin our team culture. We partner with our clients to do the right thing and do not compromise our ethics for the sake of revenue. We rely heavily on training and candid communication in an atmosphere of trust and empowerment. I’m proud of my team which is dedicated, capable, self-assured and self-motivated.