ZEE5's Chandan Khandelwal on Why Children's Content Is No Child's Play

“YouTube is a competitor that we are not aiming to beat. Let me be very clear on that.”

Chandan Khandelwal, Business Head of KidZ and Vice President of Platform Strategy at Zee 5, is making a distinction central to the business he is trying to build. YouTube has the scale, the library and the recommendation engine. More importantly, it offers an enormous supply of children's content at no direct cost to viewers. Khandelwal is not proposing that Zee 5 take on that business. He wants parents to find a reason to choose something different.

That reason, he says, lies in curated content, parental controls, original stories and a viewing experience designed for families. The intended customer is not necessarily the child in front of the television. It is the parent who decides what goes on the screen and, ultimately, whether the household pays for it.

This creates an unusual business equation. The child determines what gets watched, the parent controls the subscription and the advertiser wants access to the audience. Meanwhile, the free alternative is only a click away.

As KidZ approaches its first anniversary, Zee 5's challenge is to turn children's viewing into a business that can support subscriptions, advertising and, eventually, intellectual property that earns beyond streaming.

The parent is the customer. The child is the audience.

India's online video audience reached an estimated 664.9 million in 2026, according to Ormax Media. Its connected-TV audience grew 60 per cent year-on-year to 206.9 million. Active paid OTT subscriptions rose to 172.6 million. These are not children's viewing figures, but they point to a growing opportunity for streaming platforms to reach households through the living-room television.

Khandelwal says the idea for KidZ emerged from research conducted by Zee's network research team. The initiative was discussed at the Chairman's Office in February 2025, after the company identified gaps in Zee 5's own offering and the wider market.

The category, he argues, is often treated too broadly. “The needs of a two-to-four-year-old are very different from those of an eight-to-13-year-old,” he says. “It is a wide spectrum within a relatively small age group.”

The research also suggested that parents were invested in what their children watched, with much of the consumption happening on connected televisions. That led to what Khandelwal calls the service's “sweet spot”: content that parents and children could watch together.

“We wanted to build a family-viewing proposition with two clear priorities: quality and co-viewing,” he says.

The positioning is an attempt to move the conversation away from the sheer volume of content available online. Khandelwal argues that expectations change when a programme is watched on a 40-inch or 55-inch television rather than a mobile phone. KidZ is therefore looking at animation and live-action programming that can hold up on a larger screen.

The search for stories that can become intellectual property

KidZ's content strategy also looks beyond familiar mythological narratives. Instead of restricting itself to the Ramayana and Mahabharata or popular stories around Shiva and Krishna, the platform wants to explore lesser-known characters and worlds.

“There are a lot of classifications of characters or species within mythology itself,” Khandelwal says, naming Asuras, Rakshas and Gandharvas. “Asuras are not evil by design. There have been a lot of great Asuras that we still worship, actually. For example, Mahabali, for whom we celebrate Onam.”

One of the platform's shows draws on Anand Neelakantan's Asura: Tales for Children. Zee 5 acquired the rights to the book and developed a programme around it. Khandelwal sees such stories as a way to introduce children to a more layered version of mythology, while offering something that adults can watch too.

There is a commercial logic to this search. A platform competing for attention needs properties that are distinctive and capable of being developed over time. But finding a story is only the beginning. The harder task is to create characters audiences remember.

Khandelwal distinguishes between standalone episodes and serialised storytelling. A show built around a fresh issue in every episode, he says, allows a new subscriber to start watching at any point. “This is particularly relevant for children between four and eight years of age, who may not always follow a continuous storyline with the same attention,” he says.

Longer narratives, however, offer the possibility of building characters and worlds across seasons. Citing Harry Potter and Stranger Things, he describes the ambition to create properties that can grow beyond a single programme.

“I want to create content that allows characters to live beyond the screen,” he says. He points to Harry Potter, Stranger Things and Kung Fu Panda as examples of franchises that have expanded into merchandising, theme parks and other businesses.

His ambition is to build one or two Indian intellectual properties with comparable recognition. “As Indians, and particularly as Indian production houses, we have not created enough globally recognised intellectual properties,” he says. “There are a few examples, such as Chhota Bheem, but they remain relatively limited.”

The cost of creating original content

It is an ambitious plan in a sector facing pressure. The FICCI-EY media and entertainment report for 2026 estimates that India's animation revenue fell 6 per cent in 2025 to ₹2,700 crore. It points to subdued commissioning, pricing pressure and lower capacity utilisation. The figures do not measure the children's streaming market directly, but they underline the economics of producing original animation at a time when budgets are under strain.

Zee 5 is looking at artificial intelligence as one way to manage production costs. Khandelwal says some upcoming shows will follow an AI-first or hybrid approach, using the technology for background music, character design, action sequences and visual effects. Human inputs will remain important for dubbing, character movement and emotion.

“If you leave everything to AI, it becomes a very subdued product,” he says. The aim, he adds, is to save time and costs while making more ambitious action and visual effects possible.

The cost advantage, however, will have to show up in the finished productions. A lower production bill is useful only if the result gives children a reason to watch and parents a reason to trust the platform.

Trust is central to the pitch. Khandelwal says the company has asked production houses to create clean, family-oriented content. He cites an instance in which he intervened in a show's character design: the original version had a fair-skinned hero and a dark-skinned villain. He asked the team to reverse the representation.

“The skin colour doesn't really determine your destiny or whatever you are doing,” he says.

KidZ is also looking to develop female-centric stories and women protagonists, with an internal Standards and Practices team reviewing content and dialogue. These are creative commitments whose value will ultimately depend on what appears on screen.

The subscription question

KidZ is available through Zee 5's subscription packages rather than as a separately reported business. The platform offers an all-access package at ₹399 a month, while individual packs are priced at ₹59 monthly, ₹129 quarterly and ₹399 annually, according to Khandelwal. The proposition is to let users pay for the content they want rather than necessarily buy the entire bouquet.

That flexibility could appeal to households reluctant to take on another full subscription. But it also makes it difficult to establish how much revenue KidZ itself generates.

Khandelwal declined to disclose its current contribution to Zee 5's revenue or user base. He initially referred to an industry benchmark of 5–8 per cent and said the objective was to reach that level within three years. Later during the conversation, he put the target at approximately 10 per cent of ZEE5's revenue over the same period.

The distinction matters because KidZ is not reported as a separate business. Its contribution is included in Zee 5's overall numbers. The company has disclosed viewing figures, but not standalone revenue, subscriber numbers or profitability for the service.

Zee's FY26 annual report says KidZ had recorded more than 60 million views and 240 million minutes of watch time by March 2026, after launching with more than 140 titles. These figures establish that the content is being consumed. They do not reveal how many unique children are watching, how many households subscribed because of KidZ or how much revenue it has generated.

The advertiser wants to know who is watching

Advertising is expected to provide another source of income. Khandelwal says KidZ is approaching brands in toys, apparel, edutainment and gaming, and plans to introduce advertiser-funded content in the next financial year.

But children's programming presents a measurement problem. The account usually belongs to a parent, not the child watching the content.

“The primary account is generally registered in a parent's name,” he says. “This makes it difficult to establish the exact age group of the child watching the content or identify the precise audience demographics.”

Parents may also be watching alongside their children, or watching cartoons themselves out of nostalgia. “Many adults enjoy cartoons because of nostalgia,” he says.

For advertisers, that makes the audience harder to define. A platform may report substantial watch time, but brands need to know who is watching and whether that audience fits a campaign. Khandelwal says the company currently works with certain assumptions when evaluating demographics. That is less precise than identifying the viewer directly, and could make it harder to command higher advertising rates.

Why Zee 5 is keeping premium content off YouTube

KidZ has a presence on YouTube, but Zee 5 has reduced the availability of premium and original content there. Trailers, promotional material and some library content remain. Khandelwal says the move is intended to protect the value of exclusive content and make Zee 5 the primary destination for it.

“At present, we are doing better on our own platform,” he says. But he qualifies the comparison: newer and premium content is exclusive to Zee 5, the company markets it actively, and its YouTube presence is more organic. “We are not spending as much on the platform, nor are we putting our premium intellectual property there.”

It is not an apples-to-apples comparison. But the strategy is clear: use YouTube to attract attention, not to give away the content that might persuade families to subscribe.

Khandelwal says Zee 5's differentiation lies in Indian stories made with global-quality animation, a child-safe environment and distribution across languages. The company is particularly focused on Telugu and Tamil, through both dubbing and the acquisition of content originally produced in those languages. Originals can be dubbed into multiple languages because Zee 5 owns the intellectual property; acquired titles depend on the language and dubbing rights negotiated with their owners.

From viewing minutes to a business

Khandelwal's next priorities are content, marketing and the profit-and-loss account. He wants KidZ to become a brand parents recall when deciding what their children can watch. He is also exploring television distribution and international syndication.

The ambition is to build a franchise, not simply a catalogue. But that requires more than commissioning shows and accumulating viewing minutes. The characters must find an audience, the audience must return, and the platform must find ways to earn from that loyalty.

KidZ has a library, early viewing figures and a proposition built around parental trust. It has also recognised the limits of competing directly with free content. What it has not yet disclosed is the financial evidence that its model is working.

The first year is less a verdict than a starting point. The next test is whether children keep coming back, parents are willing to pay, advertisers can be convinced of the audience and any of the characters become valuable enough to travel beyond the app.

The ambition is to create a legacy. The business will have to show that it can pay for one.