UTV Global Broadcasting is launching a new channel ‘UTV Action’, which will showcase fast-paced and high-octane Hollywood movies, dubbed in Hindi, besides some of the latest action movies from Bollywood. However, according to industry sources, this move may be just the renaming of an erstwhile channel, as the company is winding up its channel ‘Bindass Movies’, which airs the same content as that of ‘UTV Action’.

“With the movie business getting bigger and with the market maturing, the generic movie platform will have to pave the way for specialty movie offerings. The best opportunity and prospects in such a scenario lies within the action genre. We are hoping to receive great response from our audience. The channel has already roped in advertisers that include Hindustan Unilever, Asian Paints, TVS Tyres, HCL Computers, Hero Honda, Castrol, Bajaj, Airtel, Perfetti and Marico,” said MK Anand, chief executive, UTV Global Broadcasting, in a release.

UTV’s ‘Bindass Movies’ channel has a viewership of 4.3 over the past four weeks which is far better than Zee Action (1.5 over the past four weeks), an action movie channel. “The action channel is always for a niche market and I think they will adopt the pay mode for this channel. You can command some pricing for it rather than going free-to-air. They will try to earn approximately Rs10 crore-Rs12 crore annual subscription from such types of channels,” said Sheetal Malpani, media analyst, Brics Securities Ltd.

In January 2010, ‘UTV Action’ will be broadcasting 15 blockbuster titles like ‘Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon’, ‘Men in Black’, ‘Black Hawk Down’, ‘End of Days’, ‘Bad Boys-II’, ‘Grudge’, ‘Vertical Limit’ and ‘Ab Tak Chappan’.

— Pallabika Ganguly