Recently in Bollywood Category

Cable television is undergoing worldwide expansion, especially in the Arab world. 

I have previously spoken on The Second Sight about "cultural crossover content", in other words, the growing market for, say Bollywood movies, in western countries including the United states - first from immigrant and first generation Indian Americans - followed by the trend towards becoming part of mainstream culture.   See NYT's article on the  red carpet, New York opening for the recent Bollywood release, Guru. American children take globalization for granted.  Japanese anime is as much a part of their pop culture as it is to children in Japan.

I firmly believe this trend towards "cultural crossover content" will increase as the game generation ages and media firms continue to exploit emerging foreign markets.  I have highlighted some of this under the catagory (of the same name) here at The Second Sight.

More specific to this entry's title, I was recently informed of a wonderful Arab media and entertainment link sahafa.com .  More on that market later.

According to The Hindi Business Line, UFO Moviez (a subsidary of Apollo International) intends on rolling out digital cinema into 2,000 screens by 2008. The company plans to invest invest close to $40 million for said rollout. 

Acording to Raaja Kanwar, Vice-Chairman and Director, UFO Moviez, the expansion is not restricted to India:  "We plan to be present in around 1,000 screens in India by March 2007, and in 1,000 screens outside India. As far as the international foray is concerned, we would be mostly looking at markets which have a large segment of NRI population."

In August it was reported that the company had acquired a 51 percent stake in susidary DG2L Technologies.  This enabled UFO Moviez to acquire worldwide rights to MPEG 4 cinema.  As blogger Pilgrim of Digital Cinema Matters put it when posting on the August buy out: "I like the term "near-2K", which I guess means 1920x1080 standard full HD resolution, not to mention the exclamation mark, which is not something you see often in US digital cinema press releases."

According to a Moneycontrol India, this development will enable the largest unified digital cinema chain in the world.  From the piece:

"India is on the forefront of the digital cinema revolution and with this deal bringing together the two titans of this revolution UFO Moviez, the world's largest integrated digital cinema network and Chennai based Pyramid Saimira Theatres Limited (PSTL) for the digitization of 1000 (PSTL) theatres over the next three years all over India will create the largest integrated digital cinema chain in the world. UFO Moviez shall be providing end to end digital cinema solutions for the theatres in the Pyramid Saimira chain at a cost of Rs.150 Crores."

and

"Mr. Sanjay Gaikwad, Executive Director/CEO, UFO India Pvt. Ltd. said, "We anticipate that this tie up with Pyramid group will chart the way for the digital revolution happening in the field of cinema exhibition. A single integrated chain of 1000 digital cinemas all over India will provide producers and distributors a unique opportunity for saturated wide spread release in the week of release itself. Worldwide, there is tremendous excitement about this technology which is being hailed as the next great leap in film distribution and exhibition"."

India: Asia's emerging economic superpower—Part 8

Excerpts:

"The first foreign-made silent movie was shown in India more than a hundred years ago in 1896. The venue was Mumbai (Bombay). The first domestic movie was produced there, and ever since Mumbai has become the center of movie production."

"With the advent of talkies, multilingual India developed a number of distinct movie industries, one for each major language spoken in the country."

"India has 16 official languages, but the influence of Bollywood cinema was instrumental in making Hindi the common language for the whole of India."

"The Tamil film industry (known as “Kollywood”) based in Chennai (Madras) and the Bengali film industry based in Kolkata (Calcutta) are also booming. India is a movie superpower, producing the world’s largest number of films, about 800 every year. Of those, more than 30 percent are Bollywood films, and about 20 percent are from competitor Kollywood."

The Hindu : National : Online DVD movie rental catches up

Excerpts:

"Bangalore: Online DVD movie rental - a popular way abroad to see films at home - has come to India. After Bangalore, Delhi is the city whose residents can borrow Indian and international feature films on DVD by making their selection from a website."

"The titles will be delivered by hand, the next day - and collected after one has finished viewing them."

"The service was pioneered in Bangalore, a few weeks ago, by www.seventymm.com an entertainment portal that offers selections from a library of over 10,000 titles."

"You can borrow the DVDs as long as you like. Another Bangalore-based service is www.catchflix.com, where the rate is Rs. 99 for the loan of each DVD."

"The home video segment is estimated to represent less than a tenth of India's Rs. 7,000 crore film industry revenues."