&flix

About &flix

&flix is a television channel owned by Zee Entertainment Enterprises Limited (ZEEL), currently operating as a sports channel after a genre conversion that took effect on April 1, 2026. For most of its history, from its launch on June 3, 2018, until the 2026 conversion, it was an English-language movie channel showcasing mainstream Hollywood films, having replaced Zee Studio as the network's English movie offering. The channel's lineage stretches back to March 2000, when it began as Zee Movies, and it has carried a succession of names, including Zee MGM, ZMZ and Zee Studio, before adopting the &flix brand with the slogan "Leap Forth". Broadcasting in standard and high definition from Mumbai, it remains on air under the &flix name while Zee seeks regulatory permission to rename it as a sports channel.

History and Lineage

&flix has one of the longest continuous lineages among Indian English entertainment channels. It was launched on March 15, 2000, as Zee Movies, alongside Zee English, the channel that would later become Zee Café. Later in 2000, the channel was renamed Zee MGM, followed by another renaming to ZMZ in 2004. During a broadcaster-wide rebrand on March 28, 2005, it adopted the name Zee Studio, a brand that lasted for more than a decade, with a high-definition feed launched in 2011. Zee Studio served as Zee's English movie channel through the 2000s and much of the 2010s.

On June 3, 2018, Zee Entertainment replaced Zee Studio with &flix, launching the new channel at 1 pm with the premiere of the Marvel film Spider-Man: Homecoming. The launch came less than a year after the network had introduced &Privé HD in September 2017, a premium high-definition-only English movie channel, and it positioned &flix as the mainstream counterpart to that niche offering. Zee Studio went off air as &flix took its place, with the network ceasing investment in the older brand.

The 2018 Launch

The launch of &flix was one of the most heavily marketed channel launches of its year. Zee rolled out television commercials, digital, outdoor and print campaigns across six metros, Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Chennai and Hyderabad, which the network identified as the core markets for the channel. The campaign, conceptualised by Publicis India in partnership with Zee's in-house team, carried the tagline "Leap Forth" and the positioning statement that great movies do not just tell viewers what is, but what could be. The target audience was defined as viewers aged 15 to 40 in the SEC A and B socio-economic segments, characterised by the network as "strivers" pursuing new experiences.

The channel's programming proposition was built around premieres: &flix promised 52 movie premieres in its first year, one every Sunday, from a roster of around 400 titles, with a library the network said would grow to 450 titles. Launch titles included Spider-Man: Homecoming, Baby Driver, Life, The Emoji Movie, Atomic Blonde, Jumanji and Blade Runner 2049. To support this, Zee closed output deals with Sony Pictures, Paramount and Disney, alongside acquisitions from independent Hollywood studios, giving the channel a mix of action, drama, comedy and animation. Industry estimates cited at the time put the English movie genre's advertising expenditure at around 500 to 550 crore rupees, with about 51 million of India's 183 million television households watching English movies.

Ownership and Corporate Structure

&flix is owned and operated by Zee Entertainment Enterprises Limited, one of India's largest and oldest private broadcasters, founded by Subhash Chandra of the Essel Group. The channel sits within Zee's premium English entertainment cluster, which at various times included Zee Café, the English general entertainment channel, and &Privé HD, the premium movie channel. Zee's broader portfolio spans Hindi general entertainment, movies, regional channels across India's major languages, and digital operations, with the company referring to itself as 'Z' following a major network rebrand in June 2025.

The business cluster head for Zee's premium channels at the time of the &flix launch was Aparna Bhosle, while Punit Misra served as chief executive of the domestic broadcast business and Prathyusha Agarwal as chief marketing officer. The launch reflected Zee's strategy of segmenting the English movie audience between the mainstream &flix and the premium, HD-only &Privé HD, which carried acclaimed and award-winning cinema with the slogan "Feel the Other Side".

Programming as an English Movie Channel

During its years as an English movie channel, &flix showcased mainstream Hollywood blockbusters across genres, from superhero films and big animation titles to action, drama and comedy. The Sunday premiere slot was the centrepiece of the schedule, with the channel premiering a new film every week. The graphics and on-air packaging for the channel were developed by the Canadian branding agency Zink, which also designed the packaging for &Privé HD; the latter's design won awards from PromaxBDA India in 2018.

The channel operated in both standard-definition and high-definition feeds from launch, a distinction from its sibling &Privé HD, which was HD-only. With the Zee network's major rebrand on June 7, 2025, &flix received a new logo and a common new graphics package shared with the other "&" branded channels, aligning its look with &TV, &pictures and &xplor HD.

The 2026 Conversion to a Sports Channel

On April 1, 2026, Zee Entertainment converted &flix from an English movie channel into a sports channel, as part of a strategic move to re-enter sports broadcasting with full-fledged channels, a decade after selling the Ten Sports channels to Sony in 2016. The conversion was disclosed in Zee's new Reference Interconnect Offer released on March 1, 2026, and took effect alongside the shutdown of &Privé HD and the conversion of Zee Café, the English general entertainment channel, into a sports channel as well. The Marathi free-to-air movie channel Zee Chitramandir was shut down at the same time.

Under the conversion, the channel names remain unchanged for a transitional period until Zee secures permission from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting to rename the broadcast licences. The new sports channels are tentatively called Zee United Sports 1 and 2, with industry listings identifying the &flix replacement as Unite8 Sports 2, broadcasting in English. For the interim, &flix has been airing highlights of the International League T20 (ILT20) cricket tournament, Zee's only noteworthy sports property at present, with &flix carrying the English presentation and Zee Café the Hindi. Direct-to-home operators such as Tata Play have moved the channel numbers of both channels into the sports category in their guides.

Distribution and Availability

&flix has been available on major direct-to-home platforms, including Dish TV, Tata Sky (now Tata Play), Airtel Digital TV and Sun Direct, as well as digital cable networks such as Hathway, since its 2018 launch. The channel was carried in both SD and HD variants, and its placement in the English movies genre of electronic programme guides reflected its positioning for the eight years it operated as a movie channel. Following the April 2026 conversion, distributors have repositioned the channel in the sports genre, reflecting its new programming.

The channel is offered through Zee's Reference Interconnect Offer to distribution platform operators, with published a-la-carte pricing, and it is included in Zee's curated channel bouquets. Its availability across DTH and cable platforms has given it nationwide reach, and the sports conversion has preserved its distribution while changing its content.

The Decline of the English Movie Genre

The conversion of &flix reflects the broader decline of English-language television genres in India. Zee's exit from the English movie genre followed the earlier closures of HBO South Asia and WB by WarnerMedia India in December 2020, and the English general entertainment genre has contracted even more sharply, with the closures of AXN in 2020, Star World and Star World Premiere HD in 2023, and Comedy Central in 2025. Following Zee's exit, only three broadcasters remain in the English movie genre: JioStar with Star Movies and Star Movies Select, Sony Pictures Networks India with Sony Pix, and Times Network with Movies Now, MNX, MN+ HD and Romedy Now.

Industry analysts attribute the decline to the rise of over-the-top streaming platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and JioHotstar, whose large libraries of American and international content have drawn away the urban, English-speaking audience that sustained these channels. For Zee, the strategic response has been to redeploy the &flix and Zee Café channel capacity toward sports, where the company sees growth potential through properties such as the ILT20.

Brand Identity

The &flix brand was created as part of Zee's premium "&" sub-brand family, which also includes &TV, the Hindi general entertainment channel, &pictures, the Hindi mainstream movie channel, and the HD-only &xplor HD for niche and arthouse Hindi cinema. The "Leap Forth" slogan and the positioning around aspirational, larger-than-life stories defined the channel's identity at launch, with the in-house creative team working alongside Publicis India on promos and promotional material. The channel's sizzle reel, developed by the Canadian agency Zink, was showcased publicly at launch.

With the June 2025 Zee megarebrand, the channel's logo and graphics were refreshed in line with the other "&" channels. Between Zee's 2017 and 2025 megarebrands, most of the network's non-news channels placed their logos in the top-left corner of the screen, shifting back to the top-right with the 2025 rebrand. Following the demise of &Privé HD and &flix's exit from the English movie genre, only Hindi channels still actively use the premium "&" sub-brand.

Key Facts

&flix is a television channel owned by Zee Entertainment Enterprises Limited, headquartered in Mumbai, Maharashtra. It began on March 15, 2000, as Zee Movies, became Zee MGM later that year, ZMZ in 2004 and Zee Studio in 2005, and was relaunched as &flix on June 3, 2018, replacing Zee Studio as Zee's English movie channel with the slogan "Leap Forth". On April 1, 2026, Zee converted &flix into a sports channel, tentatively to be renamed Unite8 Sports 2, airing cricket highlights including the ILT20 in English. The channel remains on air in SD and HD, now positioned in the sports genre.