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Pentamedia Graphics, the Chennai-based entertainment graphics company with the market capitalisation of over Rs 3,000 crore, will give its shareholders the option to convert GDR's listed in the London Stock Exchange and Luxumberg Stock Exchange into ADRs.

The company currently has about three million GDRs traded in these two stock exchanges. "The decision regarding this has been taken and the meeting, to be held on the 12 May, will ratify this," said V Chandrasekaran, chairman and managing director of the company.

The company also plans to acquire about eight companies in the international market soon. These companies will be related to graphic software. The company has earmarked about $100 million for the acquisitions. "This is the initial amount we have earmarked for the acquisitions," he said

 

The company has already acquired Manila-based animation company Kingdom Animasia for about $5 million recently.

Besides, the company has also entered into an agreement with 3D Max Media for transfer of animation technology.

Both the companies are planing to produce and market an animation film in Hindi and Tamil in about nine months. In the second stage, the company will also webcast an English version of the movie. "We are in the process of producing a movie in Hindi and Tamil with Raj Kapoor and MGR as the lead actors using animation technology. This will be webcast later in English also," he said.

In the meanwhile, the company has announced the launch of its Internet broadcasting venture, www.numtv.com, in India. According to Chandrashekaran, numtv.com is completing the final phase of testing and is graduating into a commercial launch stage by June 2000.

According to him, with the launch of this new venture _ the audio-video compression technique developed by Pentamedia _ the transmission of the entertainment content from Hollywood to India has become a reality.

The company has also entered into a strategic alliance with Sony Entertainment, Sony Max, CNBC India, Sun TV, Gemini TV, Udya TV, Surya TV, Raj TV, Raj Digital Plus among others. The company has already activated the marketing front of the numtv.com in the US and Europe.

The company is also in the process of working out a revenue-sharing model with the television channels as a revenue stream for the venture.

The company is looking at subscription and advertisement as the revenue model for it. It is expecting a subscription base of about half a million for numtv.com in a few years.

According to him, the television channels with which the company has strategic alliance have shown interest in spinning numtv.com as a separate company in equity partnership with them. "Our partners have shown interest in this, but we are yet to decide on it," he pointed out.

numtv.com is also encoding separate streams of audio-video signals for different users like 56 K telephone, ISDN, broadband, cable modems and set top box users.