Thursday, October 22, 2009

Symbiotic money minting ways of Indian television channels and movies



The showbiz business is the one of the biggest money minters in the country. Over the time, the movie industry in India has metamorphosed itself into a fully grown professional business unit. Now and then there have been changes which have helped those involved to mint more and more money.

One of the recent advancement is the entry of the movie makers into the TV world. While UTV took the approach of venturing into movie making first and then launching a movie channel of its own to showcase the movies and to leverage maximum benefits from the television rights of the movies. Down south, Sun network and Kalaignar network have well established television channels with a strong viewer ship and now they have ventured into the realm of film producing. This helps them to market their films to the wide audience they already have through their strong television base. Now with Sun TV cruising fast in the DTH space through its Sun Direct DTH, it has more control over distributing contents and can play strategy games with competitor show times and signals.

In either of the cases, the aim is to leverage as much from a single product possible and more importantly not allowing other competitors to gain out of it. Apart from the earnings gained off the movie’s theatrical runs, the producers have the television rights of their movies specially guarded for their channels to showcase the film on a festive season , thus gaining maximum revenue possible.

The television channel also acts as a publicity media for the movie telecasting exclusive premier of the movie songs for the first time . The relationship between the movie and television channel can best be described as a symbiotic one where both parties stand to gain from each other. The best thing about the whole part is that audience get to see these movies very early these days but 50% running time for advertisements as well.

Monday, October 12, 2009

Shopping this Diwali: A boon to the customer, Written for moneymint.in

With the biggest Indian festival just round the corner, the consumer is flooded with attractive offers from various brands to woo him. Here are some of the best ones. The list of what ,where and how to buy this diwali:

In the auto market, the manufacturers are offering discounts in the range of Rs 50,000 on select cars. Added to this is the attractive loan rate offers from various banks. A skoda Fabia is costing you Rs50,000 less than the same time last year and a Hyundai Sonata would end up making a saving of Rs35,000 for you. As far as the car loan rates are concerned, as usual SBI leads the race with as low as 8.5% while ICICI and HDFC hover around the 11% mark.

Moving on to the consumer electronics, the market is flooded with discounts and offers of gifts and other attractions. Samsung is giving out 22-inch LCD TV free with every purchase of 40 or above inch LCD TVs. ompanies such as Sony, Samsung, LG and Voltas are offering interest-free finance schemes, some even translating into zero downpayment and processing fee. If you turn to the newspapers, it is full of offers from all major retailers with their offers.

House buyers are also in for some good news. In case you have zero’ed in for the house, the banks are offering attractive teaser rates for initial years with some lenders giving an option to shift to either fixed or floating rates in subsequent years. Please bear in mind that the loan rates are a must to go up subsequently but we can at least save some money in the initial years. And the concept of processing fees has been waived off by majority of the banks.

Going to mobile segment, Nokia offers gifts upto Rs1,00,000 on purchase of mobiles and attractive gifts such as reebok sunglasses worth Rs5,000 and reebok bags and many other assured gifts on select models. Retailers are not far behind. Univercell, a prominent brand in Tamil Nadu is offering attractive discounts and also 5% cash back on purchases made with a HDFC credit card. The Mobile store has come up with a money back scratch card for all brands except Nokia , by which you stand to win upto 55% of your mobile cash back.

With such huge offers pouring in, cosumers need to observe some restraint and spend some time researching on various topics using internet and calling the respective stores in order to figure out the real offers from the fake ones and get benefitted. Happy shopping Diwali!!

The main article can be found here.