Reliance Entertainment to start Cinema halls' Chain in US

No. It's not an April fool. It's true. Reliance Entertainment is all set to start a chain of Cinema halls called 'Big' in the US that will be showing Hindi movies as well as other regional Indian movies. There will be almost 200 cinema halls under the brandname showing these movies.

Reliance's movie theaters' chain in India is known as Adlabs which Reliance Entertainment had acquired from Manmohan Shetty. But the US chain will be branded as Big, which is also the music label and FM brand of Reliance Entertainment.

From the movie makers' point of view, the project will be welcome only as it will give a better chance to Indian movies in the US as there is a number of Asian viewers in the US.

Get Out, Get Going!

Telecommunications. One of India's fastest progressing markets. And a victim of government's moves too, it seems.

Use of cellphones in India has incressed at an excellent rate and we have more than 20 crore users, with an overall mobile penetration of almost 17%. But the market has lots of opportunities to grow which we can guess with the number of attractive schemes launched by the companies and public's response to them. It is also worth noting that even though we have a high rate of increase, we are still far behind the global mobile penetration of 44%.

In such a market, the fierce competition among various mobile companies is natural. But the way the government is trying to encash the growth, using not-that-ethical ways, cannot be considered as a very good practice. For example, the way govenrment asked for more money later on the spectrum allocation was out of understanding. If the 1651 crores was the 2001 price, it should have been changed earlier itself.

Probably this is one of the main reasons they're all moving out of country too. Yes, the telecom biggies of the country have started finding places outside. The CDMA giant of India, Reliance Communications, has acquired a licence in Uganda and is planning to invest big money in the African country. It is interesting that there are already 5 companies, MTN, Uganda Telecom, Hits Telecom, Celtel and Warid Telecom, with whom Rcom shall have to compete. The company is expected to start its operations by the end of 2008, and is planning to provide GSM, Wi-fi and Wimax services there.

On the other hand, the GSM giant Bharti Airtel had already announced its launch in Sri Lanka in January'07 and is expected to start its services by April '08. Sri Lanka, Bharti is keen to roll out Airtel in several Saarc countries, such as Nepal, Maldives, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Pakistan.

In fact, reportedly Bharti is trying to get an operating licence in Vietnam also, without any buy outs. Thus, our companies are really going the international way.

And above this all, Mukesh Ambani has recently made an statement saying RIL will emerge as a "successful multinational" by focusing on overseas business. Tatas are already going more global everyday with the buyouts like Daewoo Motors and Corus.

So the funda is simple now, if you want to progress high, get out and get going.

Reliance - Now in DTH

Once it was Reliance that brought mobile phones in the hand of common man. And probably this time the history is going to repeat itself. This time Reliance is all set to jump into the market of Direct-to-Home (DTH) service. The services are expected to start by March '08.

Following the same old path it has always been following, Reliance is this time in a mood to have a contract with Toshiba to provide 15 million new TV sets which will be provided with the DTH connections. The package is expected to cost somewhere around Rs 10,000-12,000.

The entry of Reliance in the DTH market is expected to be interesting. As the last time when Reliance entered the cell phones' market, the condition was pretty much the same. Cell phones were there in the market but the costs were keeping them out of reach of the common man and suddenly there was Reliance that brought calls at 40 paise/min and then phones for as low as Rs 500, which made others slash their rates and the result we all know.

This time too, its a lot similar yet. Although big players like Dish TV and Tata Sky are there in the field, DTH is a technology limited to a limited number of people yet and people prefer to bear with their cable operators only. For the reason, companies like Reliance and Airtel, that are soon to enter the DTH market are lobbying to get the Condition Access System (CAS) made mandatory in the 55 cities government was planning to bring it.

This is also known that the Airtel DTH is all set to release but the company is waiting for a good time to enter the market. In this situation, what will be the future of Reliance Blue Magic and Indian DTH market, will be worth watching.