iWorld
Prime Video adds Goldmines Play, betting big on dubbed South hits
MUMBAI: Prime Video has launched Goldmines Play as an add-on subscription in India, expanding its marketplace with a content-heavy service focused on Hindi-dubbed South Indian blockbusters and evergreen Bollywood films.
The streaming platform from Goldmines Telefilms offers a broad catalogue featuring popular titles such as Rangasthalam, Ala Vaikunthapurramuloo, Bigil, Sarileru Neekevvaru, Sarrainodu, Son of Satyamurthy, Magadheera, Oh Baby and Uppena, alongside classic Hindi films including Hera Pheri, Vaastav and Apne. The service is priced at Rs 39 a month, with an introductory offer of Rs 29 for the first month.
Positioned as family-friendly entertainment, Goldmines Play spotlights Hindi-dubbed films starring leading South Indian actors such as Ram Charan, Mahesh Babu, Vijay and Allu Arjun. Subscribers will also gain access to exclusive digital premieres.
Prime Video ads India head of marketplace (add-on subscriptions and movie rentals) Gaurav Bhasin, said the launch strengthens Prime Video’s regional content offering and underlines the platform’s role as a one-stop destination for premium streaming services.
Goldmines Telefilms founder and chief executive Manish Shah, said the move marks the company’s next phase of digital expansion, building on its dominance in satellite television and YouTube movie distribution to serve Hindi-speaking audiences nationwide.
Prime Video’s add-on marketplace allows customers to manage multiple subscriptions under a single login and billing system, with unified search, recommendations and offline downloads across services.
Gaming
India’s broadcasters say no to Fifa World Cup 2026
Fifa has slashed its asking price by 65 per cent but India’s broadcasters are still not buying
MUMBAI: The world’s biggest sporting event cannot find a single taker in the world’s most sports-mad nation. Fifa’s television rights for the 2026 World Cup remain unsold in India, and the clock is ticking loudly.
To shift the property, world football’s governing body has already swallowed hard and cut its asking price from $100m to $35m, bundling in the 2030 edition as a sweetener. It has not worked. Indian broadcasters have looked at the offer, done the sums and quietly walked away.
The reasons are brutally simple. The 2026 tournament, co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico, kicks off in a time zone that turns India’s primetime into a graveyard shift. Most matches will air between midnight and 7am IST, a scheduling catastrophe for advertisers chasing mass reach. The 2022 Qatar edition was a gift by comparison, with matches dropping neatly into Indian evenings. North America offers no such luxury.
The market itself has also changed beyond recognition. The merger of Star India and Viacom18 into JioStar has gutted the competitive tension that once sent sports rights prices soaring. Where rival bidders once slugged it out, there is now a single dominant buyer, and it is in no hurry. JioStar has valued the rights at roughly $25m, a full $10m below Fifa’s already-discounted floor price. That gap has so far proved unbridgeable.
Broadcasters are also nursing a ferocious cricket hangover. Between 2022 and 2023, Indian media houses committed well over $10bn to cricket rights alone, covering IPL, ICC events and BCCI domestic fixtures combined. After a binge of that scale, appetite for a football package that delivers a fraction of the ratings, in the dead of night, is close to zero.
The economics of football broadcasting make the maths even harder. Cricket, with its natural breaks every few overs, is an advertiser’s paradise. Football offers a 15-minute halftime and precious little else. Recovering a nine-figure rights fee from a single half-hour ad window is a stretch at the best of times. These are not the best of times: the Indian government’s tightening grip on real-money gaming and gambling advertising has vaporised a category that once underwrote the economics of big sporting events.
Nor is the World Cup an anomaly. Indian Super League valuations have cratered. English Premier League rights have softened across successive cycles. The cooling of football as a broadcast commodity in India is structural, not cyclical.
With the tournament opening on 11th June, Fifa is running out of road. It may yet blink and meet JioStar at $25m. Or it may go direct, streaming the entire tournament on its own platform, Fifa+, or cutting a digital deal with YouTube, and hoping that a generation of Indian football fans finds its way there without a broadcaster to guide them.
Either way, the beautiful game’s Indian chapter is looking decidedly ugly.
