Anil Jayaraj, the CEO of Sports at Viacom18, has called it quits after a near three-year stint. The development comes at a time when the Reliance Industries-backed company is amid a merger with Walt Disney’s Star India, the Economic Times reported yesterday.

The veteran media executive reportedly put in his papers on Monday. An email sent to Viacom18 by ET, seeking an official comment, remained unanswered.

As CEO, Jayaraj expanded Viacom18’s sports business across TV and digital with platforms like Sports18 and JioCinema.

Meanwhile, earlier this year in March, the Mint newspaper had reported that Reli­ance Indus­tries Ltd-owned Viacom18 had rejigged the responsibilities of some of its top execs.

As part of the new struc­ture, according to the Mint report, Kiran Mani, who had joined the com­pany as CEO-Digital in November 2023, was also made the head of the sports business, while the entire con­tent busi­ness was put under Kevin Vaz, who joined as CEO-broad­cast enter­tain­ment in July last year having done a long stint at Disney Star.

The report had said that Mani’s over­all man­date will include digital product, sub­scriber man­age­ment, adtech (pay­ment dis­cov­ery), mon­et­iz­a­tion, P&L (except enter­tain­ment con­tent), and influ­en­cer mar­ket­ing, in addi­tion to the sports busi­ness. Sales of lin­ear sports TV chan­nels were also brought under Mani.