Hindi
BigFlix to ramp up biz, add 100 rental stores in FY’09
MUMBAI: Reliance ADAG‘s BigFlix.com is planning to add 5000 movie titles to its Video-on-Demand (VoD) platform by the end of this fiscal.
Bollywood will comprise 65 per cent of the titles while regional films will take up the balance 35 per cent of the content.
BigFlix.com, which has just completed one year, has 1400 titles available on its VoD platform.
“We have already signed contracts with content owners for 900 titles, which will soon be added to our VoD platform. Also, within the next seven months we are looking at acquiring and adding 2800 more titles to the BigFlix platform,” BIGFlix.com COO Kamal Gianchandani tells Indiantelevision.com.
The VoD and DVD rental service provider will acquire films on a revenue share arrangement with the content right owners. Says Gianchandani, “Content owners will share 25-40 per cent of the revenues that we generate.”
While Bollywood will be the main focus, regional films will include Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi, Bengali and Gujarati, Gianchandani adds.
Meanwhile, with an aim to expand its movie rental business, Bigflix aims to launch 100 more rental stores across ten cities during the fiscal. The company currently has 17,000 titles available across its 100 movie rental stores.
“Presently, we are running 100 rental stores across ten cities including Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad, Chandigarh and Indore. We are looking at adding 100 stores in these cities by the end of this fiscal,” Gianchandani says.
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.
