B4u To Set Up Rs 100 Crore Film Fund

B4U Television Network (India) has decided to set up 'B4U film fund' with an initial corpus of Rs 100 crore within the next 6-12 months.

The company will enter into production and co-production of films. B4U will also fund projects of other film producers. The company is currently in talks with several Indian financial institutions and overseas funds to raise funds.

Ravi Gupta, chief executive officer of B4U Television Networks, said, "Setting up of the fund is part of our consolidation process where in we are repositioning our entertainment channel to relaunch it as a movie channel in October."

The strategies for movie production and financing of movies are the same. These will centre around themes such as music, romance and strong family dramas. The fund structure is being set up in such a way that there are more hits than losses.

Gupta said, "All the films that we finance would be for theatre releases. But these need not be big-budget films with popular stars. The criteria would be a good and saleable storyline and a movie that will also appeal to the television audiences."

The company feels the advantage with music is that it will then become a fodder for their B4U Music and also for B4U Movies channel. B4U Movies is already a hit channel in the overseas market and it currently has a library of 1,700 films overseas and close to 650 films in India.

B4U is already available in 15 million C&S households in India. "Serials are in over supply in general entertainment channels and the returns are not commensurate unless you are in the top three. As of now we are a free to air channel and we will also be going pay soon. We are looking at the possibility of tie-ups or be a part of a bouquet," said Gupta.

The new relaunched movies channel will air three movies a day. Besides, it will have Bollywood star talk shows, lifestyles, masala clips and chat lines related to the website. The channel will have a total Bollywood flavour.