UTV Software Communications Limited, the country’s first integrated media and entertainment company, is likely to invest anywhere between Rs 100 crore and Rs 250 crore each in the two ‘broad based’ channels that it is planning to launch this financial year.
“We are not planning to get into a specific niche play … we are not really interested in the English narrow niches. It should be broad based and the new two channels that we intend to launch will be of entertainment genre,” MK Anand, chief executive officer (broadcast), UTV, told Business Standard.
The size of each of the proposed channels will be in the range of Rs 100 crore and Rs 250 crore, he said, adding that the company was not looking at the Rs 30-40 crore kind of bouquets.
“Rs 100 crore to Rs 250 crore revenue per year channels typically would require a similar kind of investment. We have always been quite prudent when we launch channels and have a specifically-set ‘secret formula’. We try to cut down on the number of quarters instead of looking at long gestation. We always try to go for a sharp increase in the first three quarters itself and get the channel to an operationally break-even stage in the first six quarters,” Anand said.
He said the broadcast division contributed 35-40 per cent to UTV Software Communications, which reported close to Rs 1,000 crore in the financial year ending March 2011. The ‘UTV Action’ channel franchise is expanding to other languages and the company is launching more channels. With this, the broadcast division’s contribution should get up to 50 per cent in the next two years, he added.
Announcing the launch of UTV Action in Telugu here on Tuesday, Anand said the company was looking at the Tamil version sometime this financial year.
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“It’s about only one-and-a-half years that we launched Action Hindi, which is getting 45-5 minutes per view per week, which is substantially high than any other movie channel in the country. We will launch the Action channel in languages like Malayalam and Bengali sometime later as we need to first make the existing ones financially feasible. We want to take one step at a time,” he said.
When asked about the movie library that the company has for its UTV Action channel, Anand said they currently had around 250 Hollywood titles.
“One can actually launch a channel with a library of 180 movies. But a 250-300 title library will be a good defensive position to play in this market. We will be adding more titles … that’s an ongoing process,” he added.