After stepping down from the Walt Disney Company last week, Deepak Jacob has joined as group general counsel at Dream Sports Group, the parent company of fantasy sports platform Dream11 and FanCode.
Jacob revealed this news to LinkedIn lately, and wrote: “After a 13 year stint as the president and chief regional counsel for DTCI at the Walt Disney Company SEA, ME and India, I am moving on to an exciting opportunity with the Dream Sports Group (Dream11, FanCode and more) as group general counsel. Absolutely thrilled to be working with visionary entrepreneurs Harsh and Bhavit and a superlative CXO team. As an avid sportsman and sports fan, I hope to help them build a profitable and robust sports technology company while enabling the growth of the sports ecosystem in India.”
At Disney and Star India, Jacob served in legal, regulatory, government relations, standards and practices, corporate compliance functions at Star TV Network. He managed a team of 75 lawyers and non-lawyers. He was responsible for legal and regulatory aspects of all business verticals across, entertainment (national and regional), sports, digital, distribution (domestic and international), sales and films.
Additionally, Jacob is a member of the joint task force constituted by the ministry of information and broadcasting, government of India, for the phase-wise implementation of the digitization roadmap of the cable TV sector in India. He’s also nominated on the board of Broadcast Content Complaint Council (BCCC), a self-regulatory body for the regulation of content for non-news and current affairs television channels in India.
Prior to Star, he was the legal head for eBay India, where he was responsible for all India related legal, regulatory and law enforcement issues. He’s also had a three-year-stint in the telecom sector as senior legal counsel at Reliance Infocomm in the broadband and corporate wireless division. Before joining the corporate sector, he practiced as a litigation lawyer in the Delhi courts for over six years and served as a corporate lawyer with a leading law firm in Delhi.
He has been a crucial part of Star’s success story and the acquisitions of Asianet, ESPN Star Sports, Maa TV, the creation of MediaPro, and the launch of OTT platform, Hotstar.