The Hindu : Business : UFO to invest Rs. 300 cr.

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Nov 23, 2005

Business

Business

UFO to invest Rs. 300 cr.

Staff Correspondent

The company will initially set up 500 digital movie halls by mid-2006

MUMBAI: UFO Moviez, the digital cinema network launched by Valuable Media Pvt. Ltd., plans to create the largest chain of digital cinema houses by 2007 in India.

The company will initially set up 500 digital movie halls by mid-2006 at an investment of Rs. 80 crore and then scale up to 2,000 cinema halls across the country at a total investment of Rs. 300 crore.

Valuable Media is a subsidiary of Apollo international Ltd., a part of Group Apollo of which Onkar Kanwar is the Chairman and Managing Director. Addressing the media here on Tuesday, O. S. Kanwar said, "the time is ripe for the entertainment sector to reap the benefits of technology as has been the case in the past for other sectors such as travel, communications and infrastructure.''

The typical format for the digital cinema halls would include a seating capacity of 150-200 patrons and an investment of around Rs. 25 lakh each. Since they are all pre-fabricated, they can be set up within three months.

Images through satellites

The founder directors of Valuable Media are Raaja Kanwar, Sanjay Gaikwad and Usman Fayaz and the company has already installed more than 100 digital cinema halls all over India.

UFO Moviez delivers digitally mastered high quality movie images through satellite directly to cinema halls, facilitating saturated widespread release of any film without any additional cost in prints for content owners. Each theatre can schedule any film out of a possible eight to ten films at any point of time to cater to individual target audiences, without stocking multiple celluloid prints.

"For the first time in the Indian film history, distributors and cinema owners will be able to offer `First Day First Show' in as many as 2,000 halls to movie viewers,'' said Sanjay Gaikwad, CEO and Executive Director, UFO Moviez. The company plans to enter into franchisee agreements with theatres on a revenue share basis as pure service providers, without disturbing the existing business models operating in the industry between producers, distributors and exhibitors. It will have a nationwide chain of regional dealers to provide maintenance and other services to the theatre owners.

Raaja Kanwar, Director, UFO Moviez, said, "we have already received business enquiries from Europe, Russia, Mauritius, the UAE and the Far East. Indian films have a big presence in these markets and we intend to tap these in the future.''

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