English Entertainment
BBC World Service launches IndiaOnline on ground event
MUMBAI: BBC World Service, the radio division of BBC, has announced that the site bbcurdu.com is launching a series of events in three Indian cities to meet its audiences and discuss the place of Urdu in India.
Starting today 1 February in Delhi, the IndiaOnline series then goes to Hyderabad and Mumbai, engaging personalities from the media, politics and cinema scene.
BBC Urdu service head Mohammed Hanif says the bbcurdu.com team is excited about the IndiaOnline initiative. “We are stepping from the virtual world into the real world to come face to face with our users. A good proportion of bbcurdu.com users are India’s Urdu speakers. Along with the opportunity to directly interact with our online users in India, the IndiaOnline series of discussions will give us a chance to gain fresh insights into the status of Urdu in modern-day India and share them with Urdu-speakers, wherever they are in the world.”
In Delhi and Hyderabad, the bbcurdu.com journalists will discuss the subject of Urdu and New Media in panel discussions. In Delhi the event is being held in partnership with Jamia Milia Islamia and will be held at the Ansari Auditorium at 4 pm today.
In Hyderabad, where bbcurdu.com has partnered Maulana Azad Urdu University, the discussion will take place at 10 am on 5 February at the Jubilee Hall.
In Mumbai a high profile panel will discuss the relationship between Urdu and Bollywood and how it has changed over the years. This event will be held at 6 pm on 12 February at the Xaviers Institute of Communications.
bbcurdu.com has up-to-the minute news, features and analysis on Pakistan, India and South Asia as well as news from the rest of the world. Along with text, visitors are able to listen to the audio of radio programmes and comment in online debates.
Having recently ventured into online video, it claims to be the largest Urdu news site in the world with more than 13 million page impressions a month.
English Entertainment
Ellison takes his Paramount-Warner Bros case straight to theater owners
The Skydance chief goes to CinemaCon with promises and a skeptical crowd waiting
CALIFORNIA: David Ellison strode into a room packed with thousands of cinema owners and executives at CinemaCon in Las Vegas on Thursday and did something rather bold: he looked them in the eye and asked them to trust him.
The chief executive of Paramount Skydance vowed that his company would release a minimum of 30 films a year if regulators greenlight its proposed $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery, a deal that has made theater owners deeply, and loudly, nervous.
“I wanted to look every single one of you in the eye and give you my word,” Ellison told the crowd. “Once we combine with Warner Bros, we are going to make a minimum of 30 films annually across both studios.”
It was a confident pitch. Whether it landed is another matter. Cinema operators have already called on regulators to block the deal, and scepticism in the room was hardly concealed.
Ellison pushed back by pointing to recent form. Paramount, born from the merger of Paramount Global and Skydance Media last August, plans to release 15 films this year, nearly double the eight it put out in 2025. Progress, he argued, was already underway.
He also threw theater owners a bone they have long been chasing: all films, he pledged, would run exclusively in cinemas for a minimum of 45 days, drawing applause from a crowd that has spent years fighting for exactly that commitment across the industry.
“People can speculate all they want,” Ellison said, “but I am standing here today telling you personally that you can count on our complete commitment. And we’ll show you we mean it.”
Fine words. The regulators, however, will have the last one.
