GV Films,1-Net tie up

Chennai-based G V Films has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with 1-Net Singapore, a wholly owned subsidiary of MediaCorp, Singapore, for webstreaming of over 6,000 Indian films. G V Films expects to launch its new portal, a paid website to watch movies in the next four months.

The objective of MoU is to stream and distribute films to the global audience. "This is in line with Singapore's Digital Exchange Strategy to encourage more digital content to be hubbed, processed, managed and distributed from Singapore," said Kimberley Foo, assistant director, games and entertainment division of Infocomm Development Authority (iDA) of Singapore.

Addressing a press conference, Mahadevan Ganesh, chairman of G V Films said that the company had invested Rs 90 crores in attaining the internet copyrights for the 6,000 films in the last four years. 1-Net Singapore will share about 15 per cent of the revenues from movie portal during the first year, however, Ganesh declined to comment further on the revenue sharing method.

He claimed that they have got the largest collection of internet rights ranging for films like Bobby to the recent award winning Tamil movie Pithamaghan.

Ganesh added that the high end technical work will be undertaken by 1-Net Singapore and Visakhapatnam-based Drushya, a company responsible for delivering all movies for web.

Two portals viz, gvtamilfilms.com and telugupictures.com will be hosted by 1-Net Singapore who have invested resources for content distribution.

The websites, which are paid sites, have both subscription and pay-per-view modes with a download time of 15 minutes for which the customer payment will be through credit cards.