Alexander Zharov in an interview with TASS: «The Russian media business needs to remain forever young»
Alexander Zharov, CEO of Gazprom-Media Holding, gave an extensive interview to TASS news agency, in which he spoke about the Holding’s work in 2024, upcoming premieres, international operations strategy and the development of digital assets.
«Obviously, there is demand for Russian content. We have increased production volume by 30% in the last two years. In addition to producing entertainment, comedy shows and TV series, we’ve gone into big screen production quite extensively. It’s not an easy process: it takes about two years to launch a movie».
Aleksandr ZharovCEO of Gazprom-Media Holding
Zharov talked about the movie The Wizard of the Emerald City, which will be released during the New Year holidays. He says Gazprom-Media Holding is investing money in creating a computer game based on Alexander Volkov’s novel of the same name.
The CEO of the Holding Company also shared plans for international cooperation, announcing the start of work on a joint Russian-Chinese military movie.
«We are now jointly developing with a Chinese film company a big war movie that Russian and Chinese audiences will see in 2026. I hope to talk more about this with my Chinese colleague, who is due to fly to Moscow in April».
Aleksandr ZharovCEO of Gazprom-Media Holding
Zharov noted that the Holding is not only forming close cooperation with China, but also with the UAE, Serbia and India. The latter will shoot a big show with the working title «Game Master» for the TNT TV channel.
Speaking about the development of RUTUBE, he pointed out that the growth of the domestic platform should not only be attributed to the slowdown of YouTube.
«You can certainly say we got lucky. YouTube started to take a turn for the worse and we picked up. But there’s a prime example: the Chinese social network Renren, which also started gaining users very quickly after American companies lost them quickly when they started operating poorly in China. We exist in a competitive field, and people have a lot of choice».
Aleksandr ZharovCEO of Gazprom-Media Holding
Zharov said that RUTUBE’s daily audience is currently 13.5 million people, with peaks up to 16 million, while the platform’s monthly audience reaches 70 million people. The full recording of the interview is available on the TASS channel on RUTUBE.
