BENGALURU: Former Raj TV group COO Vidyadhar Khatavkar has joined Gaian Solutions India as Chief Operating Officer – Maya Platform. He will be reporting to Gaian president and CEO Chandra Kotaru and will be based out of Mumbai.

Khatavkar will be driving growth of Maya Platform. The Maya platform for Satellite TV Channels offers a localisation technology that has potential to increase Television Broadcaster revenues multi folds, says the company.

Khatavkar says, “Indian TV Broadcast industry is at crucial stage where it is facing quite a few challenges. However, it is poised to leap towards next growth cycle and the process of digitisation is one such steps and technology will be playing the role of ‘driver’ in this growth. Maya Platform is such a breakthrough technology and product, which has potential to change the Indian television market scenario.”

Gaian is a Seven year old Media Technology and Services company headquartered in Silicon Valley, San Jose, USA with satellite R&D development centers in Hyderabad and Visakhapatnam in India and Shenzhen in China. 

Khatavkar has spent over 23 years in the industry. Khatavkar has been associated with the Zee Network for 13 years. He was part of the core team that launched the Zee Alpha channels. He was also the national sales head for all the regional channels at Zee from 2000-2002. Till 2005, he was business head, Zee Gujarati; and his last assignment with Zee was as senior vice-president - sales, Zee Sports. In May 2006, he departed from the Zee umbrella to join B4U, where he spent two years.

After Zee, Khatavkar was Senior Vice President of Cellcast Interactive overlooking media strategy, acquisition, consumer research, airtime sales and sponsorships. He later joined the Raj TV Network as Group COO, where he worked for about two years.