The latest industry numbers for the broadband and broadcasting industries seem to confirm what many industry watchers have been warning for years — the rising penetration of affordable and high-speed wired internet will displace cable and DTH services in India. While this has always been seen as a theoretical possibility or hypothesis, new data from […]
A month after it started reopening its amusement parks, Wonderla Holidays announced that it would reopen its flagship Wonderla Kochi park on Sept 1. This is the third and the last of the main locations for the company that is getting reopened after the second wave of COVID-19. South India’s biggest amusement park chain had […]
Vodafone Idea, the country’s third largest telecom operator, said it plans to launch a music streaming service in tie-up with a large content provider in the coming days. The service, said CEO Ravinder Takkar, would be available to all of the company’s prepaid and postpaid subscribers. The company currently has a free video streaming service […]
Bharti Airtel, formerly India’s biggest telecom operator, announced plans to take its fiber-based broadband services to nearly every town in India over the next three years, except for the smallest of the small. The company, which is currently launching its fiber services in more than 1 new town per day, said it plans to take […]
RailWire, the wired service from Indian Railways’ RailTel Corp, has announced a set of new plans offering more data for lower monthly subscription amounts. The move comes less than a month after BSNL introduced new plans in the low-tariff category. The highlight of the new RailWire plans is the new 50 Mbps, which is priced […]
Wonderla Holidays Ltd, India’s largest amusement park chain, said it will re-open its Hyderabad amusement park from Aug 5, marking the first such facility under the company management to re-open after the second wave of COVID-19. The company had reopened its hotel, Wonderla Resorts, earlier this month, but its amusement parks are still shut as […]
Amazon has expanded its Fire brand of devices and software to the service sector with the launch of its Fire TV Hotspot broadband service in India. The company started offering Fire TV branded broadband connectivity in the Indian city of Mumbai — making it possibly the only one in the world to get Amazon branded […]
Sun TV Network, the second biggest home-grown entertainment TV network in India, is planning to invest around Rs 25 cr each on two reality-based shows in Malayalam and Telugu to take on Big Boss. Currently, Big Boss — the most successful reality TV franchise in India — is with Sun TV’s primary rival in the […]
Wonderla, one of India’s top amusement park operators, reported that it had managed to recover about 77% of its revenue during the fourth and final quarter of FY21 that ended in March. The company, which operates water parks and amusement parks in South Indian states such as Kerala, Karnataka and Telangana, was able to maintain […]
PVR, India’s No.1 film exhibitor, said it has put on hold all construction and other capital expenditure related to new projects and screens, and issued a profit warning for the current quarter on account of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. “The Company opened 13 new screens in FY’21 which were already under fit-out prior to lockdown. […]
Inox Leisure, one of India’s top cinema chains, said it plans to add 8,850 seats across 11 new properties to its multiplex chain in the ongoing financial year, taking the total seats to 1.56 lakh by March. These 11 new properties would bump its screen count by 49 to 692. Out of the 49 new […]
Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd, the country’s largest home-grown television and broadcasting company, reported a modest year-on-year improvement in its advertising and subscription revenue, but also saw the usual sequential decline when compared to the preceding, holiday quarter. The company’s results have become more difficult to compare due to the fact that the seasonally strong third […]
GTPL Hathway, one of India’s largest cable feed provider and last-mile operator, said its much-delayed Android set-top-box originally scheduled be launched a year ago, is in the final stages of production and expected to reach the company by end of this month. It was in mid last year that the company announced that its Android […]
Saregama, India’s oldest and largest music label, announced that it has has been signed as by prominent film maker Sanjay Leela Bhansali as the music label for three of his forthcoming projects. These include Alia Bhatt starrer Gangubai Kathiawadi – the music rights of which has been acquired from Pen Studios, the next untitled Bhansali […]
Den Networks, a prominent Indian cable feed provider that is now part of the Reliance Industries group, today reported a set of disappointing financial performance numbers, capping a year of pain and degrowth. The company’s subscription revenue, which is overwhelmingly composed of the monthly subscription fees paid by cable TV subscribers, fell to 190 cr […]
Government of India has indicated that it found nothing illegal in channels from other DTH platforms being available for viewing by audiences of Prasar Bharati’s DD Free Dish service. There have been allegations by a section of the broadcasting industry that the availability of channels from other DTH platforms to users of DD Free Dish […]
In a sign of things slowly returning to normal, PVR announced the opening of a new multiplex theater after nearly a year. The new six-screen multiplex theater — the biggest in Mysore — will open inside Mysore’s biggest mall, Forum Center City Mall, today. PVR CEO Gautam Dutta said the new muliplex will offer “advanced […]
A Supreme Court bench of Ashok Bhushan and Subhash Reddy has asked to see the new regulations brought out by the central government on content apps. In an appeal for anticipatory bail for Amazon Prime creative head Aparna Purohit in a case of outraging Hindu sentiments, the bench asked the government what it plans to […]
Bharti Airtel has announced its entry into the lucrative, Rs 30,000 cr digital advertising market in India, making it the most serious competitor yet to Google and Facebook, which together control about 90% of the market at present. While Google leverages its access to search data and Facebook taps its access to behavioral data on […]
Vodafone Idea launched one of India’s first per-per-view service on its Vi Movies & TV platform. The service, which will enable users to rent premium video content such as new movies, will be clubbed with what the company called ‘deals from Hungama Digital’ — an independent provider digital video and audio content. Initially, the service […]
