The Indian arm of the world’s largest soft drinks company Coca-Cola India is all set to come up with an India specific arm for its corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities this year, starting with a corpus of $10 million.
DD Direct Plus, the direct-to-home (DTH) broadcasting platform of Prasar Bharati, has recently added B4U Music channel on its visibility platform. The offering has been made available since the first week of February 2008.
IndiaFM.com, a portal on Bollywood from Virtual Marketing India Pvt Ltd, has been redesigned and renamed as Bollywoodhungama.com. The site has undergone a complete makeover to sport a new and sleek look with more emphasis on content and interactivity.
Close on the heels of hitting newsstands in Delhi and Mumbai on February 16, Business Standard Ltd has now announced the launch of its business daily in Hindi in Lucknow. The paper has been priced at Rs 2 and would be circulated six days a week.
Madison Communications has been vocal in its intentions to expand in international markets, and the next market in the organisation’s radar is Sri Lanka. Madison Media is in the process of finalising details for launching an office in Colombo, and expects to commence operations there within a month.
Exemption from service tax, no custom duties on set-top boxes, occasional checks to control under-declaration by cable operators are some of the recommendations made by the IBF in its pre-Budget memorandum of the Indian broadcasting industry to the Finance Ministry.
Hindi movie channel Filmy completed two years on February 12, 2008. After having established brand Filmy and the focus in the year ahead is to take the channel forward across the areas of content and selling strategies. Filmy is looking at establishing new properties on the channel, and is in talks with other channels and production houses for deals where it can access more titles.
After consolidating its position in the kid’s television space with Chutti TV, Sun Network is set to roll out kid’s channels in Malayalam, Telugu and Kannada languages. The Malayalam channel will be called Kochu TV, while the Telugu channel will be known as Khushi TV. The Kannada channel has been christened Chintu TV.
Reliance Communications and HDFC Bank has announced the launch of mPay, claimed to be India’s first virtual credit card. The service would be available to Reliance Mobile users across the country. The user’s Reliance Mobile number would be the credit card number.
Radio One has appointed Vehrnon Ibrahim as their National Programming Head. Ibrahim moves from Red FM, where he was National Head of Programming for the station. He will take charge from March 3, 2008.
Close on the heels of launching its TVC, MCX (Multi Commodity Exchange of India) has embarked on a BTL campaign. The campaign, which encompasses outdoor medium, including cinema and in-flight entertainment, aims to simplify the concept of commodity exchange and make people connect with MCX at an emotional and rational level.
Hathway and technology solutions provider NDS have announced their partnership to launch cable Digital Video Recorded (DVR) service in India. The NDS XTV DVR solution would be deployed during 2008 and would give subscribers control over what they watched and when they watched it.
Kolkata-based JG Hosiery Pvt Ltd has launched a new TV campaign for its innerwear brand Amul Macho. The TVC, created by Saints & Warriors Productions, takes forward the ‘Crafted for fantasies’ peg adopted in the previous campaign.
Louis D’Mello, who has been CEO at IDG Publications, has now been re-designated as CEO and President of International Data Group (IDG) Media Pvt Ltd. Bringi Dev, President of IDG Media, would now be on the Board of Directors and have a strategic and advisory function.
After the multi-million dollar auction of the Indian Premier League (IPL) teams, it is now the turn of the 85-player squad to find the highest bidders. And covering all the action live would be IBN7, which will follow all the auction action throughout the day on Wednesday, February 20, 2008.