Deepening his financial stake in Hollywood, Billionaire Anil Dhirubhai Ambani has picked up a 50% stake in Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks SKG for $325 million. The investment is part of an $825 million first round of funding for Dreamworks, which will now make five or six movies a year. Ambani’s interest…

Bigflix.com, the video-on-demand and video rental service from the Reliance ADA Group, today named Preetam Shah as vice-president for international business development. Shah is currently VP for US venture operations at group firm Reliance Capital. His responsibilities at BigFlix will be in addition to those at Reliance Capital, the company…

BigAdda, Reliance Entertainment’s social networking play, has gone mobile with a mobile app, wap site and SMS features. The Big B(eta) seems to have gone well, considering they first launched the mobile app to ease Amitabh Bachchan’s blogging pains. The app, titled MobileAdda, supports Nokia (NYSE: NOK), Sony (NYSE: SNE),…

Reliance ADA Group has launched its DTH/satellite TV venture BIG TV, with 202 channels including 50 subscription VOD channels. The company says it is targeting 40 percent of the market within a year of launch, a very ambitious target, but will use all its muscle to promote it, including broadband…

—Anil Ambani is one busy man. Dreamworks SKG is near an agreement tbe funded by Reliance ADAG reports Bloomberg. As with an as yet un-finalized deal, the reports are conflicting. While in one place it states the funding is to the tune of $550 million, a sentence later it states…

Distribution is seemingly the magic sauce of the movie rental business as both Seventymm and Moviemart expand their footprint. Moviemart, earlier relegated to Delhi and the National Capital Region, has expanded its services to 300 cities in India reports Afaqs. Interestingly it has tied up with TNT, the logistics company.…

Its hard to resist a headline like that. Reliance ADAG’s love affair with the Bachchan’s continues, this time in the form a mobile blogging application called MoBlog developed especially for Amitabh Bachchan. The re-designed blog features a mobile shaped left navigation featuring twitter-esque updates from Big B (or possibly his…

Nimbus Communications has officially launched its home video entertainment rental and sale business called Showtime. The stores, which distribute DVD, VCDs and Game CDs, are currently only Bombay centric with 8 distribution centres. The release states an investment plan of over Rs 1.5 billion in the next 3 years with…

It must be hard living up to a name like that. After recently announcing development deals with eight Hollywood based studio’s, Reliance ADAG’s multi-billion entertainment arm Big Entertainment seems to be reaching for the Magic 10 figure. Mint quotes president Rajesh Sawhney expecting the firm to reach a $10 billion…

I’d gone to a Reliance WebWorld to pay the bill for my data card connection today, and noticed a BigFlicks shop-in-shop store, so took a photo (pictured above). It’s taking up quite a bit of space - they could comfortably fit around a 4 PC console there and still have…

A thought-provoking comment from Ajit Balakrishnan, Chairman and CEO of Rediff at the NDTV New Media Congress, yesterday - “underpinning the whole convergence argument is that the TCP/IP protocol needs to become common over TV. When all three channels, Internet, Mobile and TV, offer TCP/IP, it will allow a return…

An interesting insight from Kamal Gianchandani, COO of BigFlicks on content acquisition by the Reliance Entertainment. Gianchandani tells Indiantelevision.com in an interview that Reliance Entertainment has a central acquisition team, which acquires films for all platforms, keeping in mind the interests of all departments; however, if the rights are sold…

Reliance Entertainment owned Zapak and Jump games continue their licensing streak. Both gaming divisions of ADAG will develop an online and mobile game respectively, based on cricketer Ishant Sharma. The mobile game, titled ‘Cricket Fever’, will feature different forms of deliveries, with the player trying to bowl the batsmen out.…

Reliance Big Entertainment is looking to raise $500 million, divesting around 10 percent equity, reports the Economic Times. The company is in talks with PE funds like Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company (KKR), Softbank (Japan), investor Carl Icahn, and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. Reliance Entertainment, however, has declined to…

Well, the news is finally, finally out: Zapak, Reliance Entertainments online gaming company has acquired the exclusive licence for operating Crazy Kart, a Massively Multiplayer Online (MMOG) Game from Shanda, in India. One of the most successful casual games in China, Crazy Kart has apparently been under closed-beta testing in…

DTS, the digital technology company known for its DTS Digital Sound product that competes with Dolby Digital and SDDS, has sold its Digital Images business to ADAG’s Big Entertainment. According to the release, the deal closed on April 4 for $7.5 million in cash. This marks DTS’s exit from the…

In response to queries regarding foreign investment in Broadcast and Telecom sectors - with an eye on convergence - stakeholders have submitted their comments to the TRAI. On the key question of whether FDI limit for broadcast and telecom sectors be made the same, some key players have responded as…

BigFlicks.com has added Tamil Content to its online video streaming portfolio via an alliance with Raj TV Networks. BigFlicks.com is the Reliance ADA Groups video rental and online video streaming co. They’ll be offering Raj TVs content for free streaming, probably looking to offset the cost of streaming with advertising.…

Maybe this is the BIG announcement that Rajesh Sawhney had told us about - Reliance Entertainment is going to launch two separate companies - Reliance BIG TV News and BIG TV Entertainment, which set up around 20 TV channels, reports Mint. The story also mentions that the group plans to…