NDTV Imagine, the entertainment wing of Prannoy Roy-promoted NDTV Network, is close to forming a 50:50 joint venture with Manmohan Shetty - the former promoter of Adlabs - to enter film production.
The one with the curious name is the runaway leader, setting benchmarks in programming, standardisation and localisation. It doesn't hurt to be part of a formidable family.
Clearly, the mobile handset market is buzzing with new branded retail chains such as Reliance and Aditya Birla Group entering the fray and the existing chains expanding their foorprint. Take Pantaloon Retail's JV with Axiom of Dubai, for instance. The company is re-branding its standalone retail chain Mport to Axiom stores, which is among the largest telecom products chain in West Asia.
Commercials aired during the original show time will also be re-run without charging advertisers additional fee, said sources. In other words, an advertiser will get three times more air time on Star Plus for the same amount it had paid originally.
The battle for subscribers in the direct-to-home space is set to get hotter, with new player Big TV expected to fire a price war. Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group's Big TV will be commercially launched sometime in May and is looking at tying up over 5 to 5.5 million subscribers even before its launch.
STAR India, a wholly owned subsidiary of STAR Hong Kong, is exploring the possibilities of getting into the print media business in India. Last week, top STAR executives including STAR Hong Kong CEO Paul Aiello, STAR India CEO Uday Shankar and COO Jagdish Kumar were in Bangalore for meetings with possible joint venture partners for the print foray. The company is said to be in talks with Vijay Mallya's UB Group.
Bollywood's King of Romances Yash Chopra is flexing his muscle once again over revenue-sharing with theatre chains.
Vijay Mallya, whose team Royal Challengers will take on Shah Rukh Khan's Kolkata Knight Riders in the inaugural match in Bangalore, has already got busy counting the cash.
The consortium of Sony Entertainment Television and World Sports Group, which paid BCCI $60 million (Rs 240 crore) as the telecast rights fee for the first season of the Twenty 20 league has already recovered its money. Sony-WSG will together earn around Rs 380 crore (Rs 3.8 billion) worldwide from the league. Sony is confident of selling 11,800 seconds across 59 matches, at a premium. Vodafone, Godrej, Hyundai, Coca-Cola & Max New York and StanChart has already booked spots.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India floated a consultation paper on playing an active role in monitoring the Indian television viewership. TAM Media Research is the sole player in the monitoring market for the last 10 years. TAM's CEO L V Krishnan says govt should start regulating all types of rating outputs like daily newspaper polls done via SMS or even TV polls during elections and not just TV TRPs. TAM is often criticised for its poor sample size, TRP system, etc.
Star India is close to forming a joint venture with Kerala-based television broadcaster Asianet to launch a bouquet of regional channels. The deal comes after the failure of Star's joint venture with Ekta Kapur-controlled Balaji Telefilms to operate regional channels last April to get off the ground. Sources at Star said the broadcaster will hold a majority stake in the joint venture.
The bad news for newspaper publishers -- and there are over 40,000 newspapers in India -- has just grown worse. The price of newsprint, imported or indigenous, is set to touch $1,000 per tonne, and this after a 23 per cent increase over the previous four months that took prices to $760 a tonne in March. Factor in the April jump and newsprint prices, which typically account for 50 to 60 per cent of production costs, have risen over 60 per cent over the last six months.
With hundreds of theatre screens coming up across India in 2009, Texas Instruments (TI) - a leading semiconductor technology company - is eyeing the Indian cinema market with its digital light processing (DLP) technology. TI has patented the DLP technology. In DLP projectors, the image is created by small mirrors laid out in a matrix on a semiconductor chip known as a Digital Micromirror Device (DMD).
With less than a month to go for the two mega television shows - Kya Aap Paanchvi Pass Se Tez Hai of Star Plus and the BCCI-promoted Indian Premier League on Sony - companies have lined up in right earnest for sponsorship deals with the broadcasters. Star Plus has signed on a string of advertisers for the Shah Rukh Khan-anchored show. These include confectionery brand Halls, Pidilite Industries, Havells India, L'Oreal India, Tata Sky, Parle Products etc
International digital marketing company Digitas has partnered with Solutions to enter the digital marketing sector in India. Digitas is owned by global advertising major Publicis Groupe. The new entity will be called Solutions Digitas. Digital marketing was not just online marketing and India is an upcoming market for digital marketing. Digitas will also introduce Prodigious digital production that manages the technology end of digital marketing for clients such as GM & P&G.
The fee that TV channels pay to independent cable operators and the multi-system operators is set to go up by 40-50 per cent. The market for carriage fee charged by cable operators to distribute satellite television channels is on fire.A plethora of new TV channels have been launched and are jostling for space on the already choked analogue cable pipe. Nearly 330 channels are chasing bandwidth that can accommodate barely 80 channels.
Star Plus has signed up telecom major Airtel as the presenting sponsor for the Shah Rukh Khan-anchored Kya Aap Panchvi Pass Se Tez Hai. According to sources, the deal has been struck at Rs 40 crore. The Airtel deal follows on the heels of its competitor Vodafone signing up as the presenting sponsor for the Indian Premier League on Sony TV.
Bollywood is yet to catch up with Hollywood when it comes to gaining profits from film websites.
If you watch television, you just cannot miss the colourful, new fund offering advertisements by mutual funds talking about India's growing economy and how investing in them is likely to fetch great returns
Unlike KBC-3, where Airtel, MTNL and BSNL were exclusive telecom partners, this time around, the channel is going non-exclusive. The channel is in the process of getting on board almost every telecom service provider, which means that participants need not just call from an Airtel or MTNL/BSNL number.
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