Zee TV

Zee TV, launched on 2 October 1992, is the oldest privately-owned Hindi general entertainment channel (GEC) in India, the flagship channel of the Zee network and one of the most popular Indian TV channels in the world. From 1992 to 1999 it was a partnership between the Essel Group, an Indian media conglomerate, and Star TV, a subsidiary of the erstwhile News Corporation (Star now owns leading competitor Star Plus and many other channels). Zee TV has been owned by the Essel Group ever since.

Besides Star Plus, Zee TV competes with Sony TV, Colors, Sony Sab and Star Bharat in the Hindi GEC genre, the most-watched in the country. Zee has had several flanking Hindi GECs to complement Zee TV, from the short-lived Zee Next, 9X and Zindagi to the more recent &TV and the rural-targeted channels Zee Anmol and Big Magic.

YouTube: Zee TV channel ident history (1992–present) and 1994–present



1992–2000	2000–2001	2001–2002	2002–2005	2005–2011


2011–2014	2014–2016	1 January–15 October 2017	2017–present

1992–2005

From 1992 to 2005 the channel's logo consisted of the letter Z viewed from the bottom edge up, with ‘ZEE TV’ written across the bottom edge.

1992–2000

Zee TV was launched on 2 October 1992 as part of Star TV’s bouquet of satellite channels that also included Star Plus (then an English GEC), Star Movies, Prime Sports and MTV.

Zee ended its partnership with Star in 1999, paving the way for the latter to convert Star Plus into a Hindi GEC in July 2000.

2000–2001

Introduced on 17 June 2000. This logo had yellow, lilac and black graphics.

2001

2001–2002

2002–2005

Introduced on 13 December 2002.

2005–2011

A new look for the Zee network was introduced on 28 March 2005. All Zee channels adopted logos with a stylised ‘Z’ and a square rotated 45 degrees.

Business Standard

2011–2017

2011–2014

A new logo was introduced on 19 June 2011 as parent company Zee Entertainment Enterprises introduced a new brand identity. Zee TV's new look consisted of rainbows moving through a sky-blue stylised letter 'Z'. A slogan was introduced: Ummeed Se Saje Zindagi (Life, Decorated with Hope).

YouTube: Ummeed Se Saje Zindagi

However, this look was poorly received by designers, partly because the ‘Z’ could be confused for a ‘2’, and partly because of Zee's poorer execution compared to competitor Star Plus.

Brand New: Zee TV Sees Swooshes

An HD feed was launched on 15 August 2011. Zee Cinema, Zee Studio and Ten Sports also launched HD feeds.

2014–2016

In December 2014, a new graphics package was introduced. The glow and bevel effects were removed from the logo and its blue shade was darkened. The slogan was changed to Har Lamha Nayi Ummeed (‘A New Hope Every Moment’).

The new motif is a spinning top, derived from the top left portion of the letter ‘Z’. As it ‘spins’, it takes the form of a flower-like element. —Press release [1]

However, this graphics package was abandoned in June 2016, and Zee TV reverted to the 2011 ‘rainbow’ graphics.

1 January–15 October 2017

The top right corner of the logo was closed, and the swoosh within it was changed. This logo modification was done by all other Zee channels.

2017–present

A new orange logo was introduced on the evening of 15 October 2017 during the Zee Rishtey Awards 2017.¹ Almost all other Zee-branded channels, with the exception of Zing, unveiled similar logos on that day (in several cases also during an award ceremony). Several channels also launched new graphics packages, notably Zee Tamil (see below), Zee Cinema and Zee Anmol.

This the first logo in the history of the channel not to feature a stylised letter Z.²

A new slogan was introduced: Aaj Likhenge Kal (meaning ‘we'll script tomorrow today’ or ‘scripting tomorrow today’).

Along with this logo, Zee TV introduced a new graphics package consisting of an orange background with orange ripples emanating from the top left corner, where the channel logo had now been moved to.³

The idents were created by Coffee & TV of London, though not the rest of the graphics package.

Idents without audio: Amaryllis, Diwali and Gold
Idents with audio: Flower, Diya and Gold
Coffee & TV

This graphics package was introduced by Zee Tamil on the same day (15 October 2017) to coincide with the launch of its HD feed. It has been extended to other South Indian GECs (general entertainment channels) when they launched their HD feeds: Zee Telugu on New Year’s Eve 2017 and Zee Kannada on 3 November 2018. It has also been applied to Zee Keralam, a new Malayalam GEC, which was launched on 26 November 2018 in both SD and HD. Moreover, all of these channels changed their logo colour to orange.

Bengali GEC Zee Bangla also started using it on 7 October 2018, but the graphics are red instead of orange.

Furthermore, instead of having a separate ‘HD’ wordmark, the word ‘HD’ is now written in the same typeface (namely Gotham) as the channel name, and directly beside it.⁴

Footnotes

An event where actors of the channel's shows are felicitated along with celebrity entertainment performances.

Fifteen days after the TV channels rebranded, on 30 October 2017, parent company Zee Entertainment Enterprises unveiled a new brand identity. Rather than using exotic, obscure fonts (as Star TV did with Kohinoor and later Cádiz), the Zee network adopted the widespread Gotham font as its corporate typeface, as did many of its channels, including Zee TV, Zee Cinema and the aforementioned regional channels.
The logo is somewhat similar to that of German public broadcaster ZDF (in the sense that the letter Z is within an orange circle and some other letters are outside). ZDF introduced its current logo in 2001, sixteen years before Zee TV.
As part of the corporate rebrand, non-news channels bearing ‘Zee’ in their names moved their logos from the top right corner, the standard for most Indian channels, to the top left. News channels’ logos stayed put at the top right.
This has always been the case for most non-South Indian Star TV channels, such as Star Plus, Star Gold, Star Jalsha and Star Movies, where the word ‘HD’ is in the same font as the logo wordmark. (Star’s South Indian HD channels usually put the word ‘HD’ in a box, except Star Vijay.)