Tollywood gets another reason to smile

Big enough to have become one of the crucial revenue generators for Tollywood. Pushed to the wall with escalating budgets, the Telugu film industry seems to have found a new avenue of fetching revenue — satellite rights to television broadcasters — offering the producers a dependable source of income and a lifeline to the industry. In fact fancy satellite rights have enabled small films to recover their production costs even. In Andhra, film-based programmes/content fetch high TRPs on entertainment channels. Satellite rights of some films are sold before the film’s release— acting as a source of finance. A small-to-mid budget movie can fetch anywhere between Rs 60 lakh-1crore today, while big-budget films like Magadheera and Arundhati can earn up to Rs 7 crore.

The mushrooming of TV channels and the race to grab high TRPs has fuelled severe competition among the channels, who in turn shell out hefty pay cheques to production houses to buy the latest films. Satellite rights usually enable production houses to recover 10 to 30 per cent of the film’s budget. Earlier only flop films were sold to TV. Now, besides blockbusters, even yet-to-be released, untitled films’ satellite rights are being sold at astronomical prices.

Says Srinivas, head of an entertainment channel, “We look into the content of films carefully before buying them. Things like comedy content, songs, actors and actress are important for us. After all, buying films is a long-term investment for a channel,” he says and goes on to add, “For instance, if a movie has enough of comedy scenes we generate one episode of a programme.”

Arun Prasad whose Yagam (starring Bhumika Chawla) has been already sold out for more than Rs 1 crore even before the film hits the screens, says the trend kickstarted after “Tollywood started taking lessons from Hollywood and Bollywood. The satellite rights of some Bollywood films touch the Rs 10 crore mark. Even the Telugu film industry is seeing sky-rocketing prices and blockbusters could earn very big bucks. Some medium-budget movie producers earn a sizeable amount of their production cost with the satellite rights.”
In fact, small budget movies like Happy Days, Vinayakudu et al have churned out huge revenues for a channel which bought its satellite rights. K Sai Prasad, vice president of the movie channel admits that films like “Aatadu, Pokiri which were shown on our channel in recent times enjoyed good viewership and shot up the GRPs (gross rating points) during the week.