BIG Music & Home Entertainment

Reliance ADAG’s Big Music & Home Entertainment has signed an exclusive home-video licensing agreement with Paramount Home Entertainment, which was until recently associated with RPG-owned SaReGaMa in India.This agreement gives the Big Music & Home Entertainment exclusive home-video distribution rights for Paramount Home Entertainment, DreamWorks Animation SKG and Dream-Works Pictures in India and Sri Lanka, besides access to a combined library of 25,000 Hollywood titles that include the Godfather and Indiana Jones series, American Beauty, the Shrek Series and Madagascar, among others. The company had previously forged similar alliances with Universal and Warner. “With this deal we will have tied up with four of Hollywood’s top seven studios in India. We have effectively established control over 60% of the home video market in India,” Big Music and Home Entertainment CEO Kulmeet Makkar said. Hollywood films account for 15-20% of the home-video market, which is estimated to be worth Rs 130 crore. “We hope to garner Rs 80 crore of this pie,” Mr Makkar said. “Our attitude towards home-video distribution is totally different. Unlike existing players, we don’t believe that the success of a home-video depends on its theatrical fortunes.” Big Music and Home Entertainment claims that its approach of dubbing films in six regional languages has reaped rich dividends. “Universal doubled its national home-video sales after we took over the distribution,” said Mr Makkar. It will also release Blu-Ray CDs of Jodhaa Akbar for the first time in India. Blu-Ray DVDs, which store higher quality images and video than conventional DVDs, can currently only be played on specially designed DVD systems.