Hindi
Nimbus plans to invest Rs 1.5 bn in home video biz
MUMBAI: Nimbus Home Entertainment, a wholly owned subsidiary of Nimbus Communications Limited, plans to invest Rs 1.5 billion over three years as it targets a nationwide presence in the home video segment.
A bulk of the investments will be towards movie content acquisition. “Content will take away 50 to 60 per cent of our investments. We have currently entered into annual licensing deals with most of the content owners,” says Nimbus Home Entertainment COO Sanjay Sharma.
Though the spotlight is on Bollywood films, the company is also aquiring regional language movies. Nimbus boasts of already having access to 16,000 titles. “We mainly have Hindi movies. We also have Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Bhojpuri and Punjabi titles. Besides, we have world cinema titles,” says Sharma.
Nimbus will soon add Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam movie into its portfolio, elaborates Sharma.
Marketing will consume Rs 500 million over three years. Nimbus will be spending on cross-promotional retail tie-ups, customisation of offers and store-centric activities as a part of its marketing initiative.
Nimbus has launched its first four stores and eight distribution centres (stock points) in Mumbai and will now be expanding to Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Pune.
The plan is to open 140 stores in 40 cities over the first year. “We are targeting 120 cities over three years. We will be having over 240 Showtime Video stores. We are also looking at the franchise route. Besides, we are in talks with big retail chains to have a tie up with them,” says Sharma.
Nimbus Home Entertainment will operate under the Showtime brand and will offer DVD rental and sale services with an online and offline presence.
“We want to initiate customer participation. By providing services to them through our stores, distribution network, SMS system, phone-ins and even with our delivery boys, we will be bringing in more choices for the customers. We will also try to help them in deciding what movies they want to take for viewing,” says Sharma.
Nimbus hopes to rope in 500,000-750,000 subscribers in the first year. “We expect to have 3 million subscribers by the end of the third year. We will have 15-20 per cent market share,” says Sharma.
Nimbus expects a turnover of Rs 600 million in the first year of operations. “We will operationally break even when our revenue touches Rs 1.2 billion. The operating margin in this business is 35 per cent,” says Sharma.
Hindi
Remembering Gyan Sahay, the lens behind film, television and advertising
From a puppet rabbit selling poppadums to Hindi cinema, he framed it all.
MUMBAI: There are careers, and then there are canvases. Gyan Sahay, the veteran cinematographer, director, and producer who passed away on 10 March 2026 in Mumbai, had one of the latter. Over several decades in the Indian film and television industry, he turned lenses, lights, and the occasional puppet rabbit into something approaching art.
A graduate of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune, Sahay built his reputation as a director of photography across a career that stretched from the early 1970s all the way to the digital age. He was the kind of craftsman who understood that a well-composed shot is not merely a technical achievement but a quiet act of storytelling.
For most Indians of a certain age, however, Sahay will forever be the man behind the rabbit. His direction of the iconic long-running television commercial for Lijjat Papad, featuring its now-legendary puppet bunny, gave the country one of its most cheerfully persistent advertising images. It was the sort of work that sneaks into the national subconscious and takes up permanent residence.
His big-screen credits as cinematographer include Anokhi Pehchan (1972), Pagli (1974), Pas de Deux (1981), and Hum Farishte Nahin (1988). In 1999, he stepped behind a different kind of camera altogether, making his directorial debut with Sar Ankhon Par, a drama that featured Vikas Bhalla and Shruti Ulfat, with a cameo by Shah Rukh Khan for good measure.
On television, Sahay was particularly prized for his command of multi-camera production setups, a skill that made him a go-to technician for large-scale shows and reality programmes. In an industry that has never been especially patient with complexity, he was the calm hand on the rig.
In later life, Sahay turned teacher. He participated regularly in masterclasses and Digi-Talks, often hosted by organisations such as Bharatiya Chitra Sadhna, sharing hard-won wisdom on cinematography, the comedy of timing in a shot, and the sweeping changes brought by the shift from celluloid to digital. He was also said to have been involved in a project concerning a biographical film on Infosys co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy.
Tributes from the film industry poured in following the news of his passing, with colleagues remembering him as a senior cameraman who served as a rare bridge between two entirely different eras of Indian cinema. That is, perhaps, the finest thing one can say of any craftsman: he kept up, and he brought others along with him.
