A spate of bans on hyper-nationalist Indian films in some overseas markets is set to dent collections even as the film industry is yet to recover from the pandemic in its home market.
The Hollywood Reporter headed to CinemaCon to chronicle the mood as cinema owners were treated to a diverse and (hopefully) robust slate of films that will continue to lead them out of the COVID-19 crisis, as well as a parade of stars. “We are back,” chanted Rolando Rodriguez, NATO chairman and head of Marcus Theatres.
Disney+ Hotstar is the SVOD market leader in the country by some distance. Speaking at the Asia Video Industry Association’s Future of Video India conference on Friday, Rayan said that the streamer has evolved from being primarily cricket-focused to a cricket-plus-entertainment model.
Amazon had pegged its deal for MGM, which it closed last month, as worth around $8.5 billion. But the actual estimated value of the studio’s library of movies and TV shows is less than half that, the ecommerce giant disclosed Friday.
Theater owners and studio chiefs this week congregated in Las Vegas once again to celebrate CinemaCon, where upcoming big-budget and awards-hopeful films scheduled to release through the end of this year and into 2023 aimed to build early buzz.
Betting that they can’t compete with Netflix and hoping a diversified approach is more lucrative, A+E, Fox Corp. and AMC Networks are leaning into the cable bundle (and ad-supported streaming).
In response to DMCA takedown requests, Bing removed more than 143 million links from its search engine in 2021. This represents a small increase compared to a year earlier. Interestingly, those piracy-related removals in Bing also impact the results of other search engines.
The streamer’s Head of Local Originals James Farrell told a packed room in Mumbai at Amazon’s massive film and TV slate launch that one in five Amazon Prime Video subscribers outside of India watch content from the country — one of several reasons the country has become a key priority.
“The committee studied the pricing of spectrum across various developed countries and in terms of purchasing power parity. This is comparable to the price per Mhz of spectrum per capita population in developed countries. It could be slightly higher but the committee found it to be okay,” a senior officer told ET.
Brut, an official media partner of the Cannes Film Festival, is breaking new ground by partnering with Emily Yang, a celebrated digital artist known as Pplpleasr, to release 75 Cannes-themed non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on May 2. The proceeds will benefit the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative.