After severing ties,India's UTV and Palador Pictures haveseparately announced initiatives to promote world cinema.

Integrated media company UTV will soon launch a TV channel focusing on international movies from across the globe. Called World Movies, the 24-hour channel will be targeted at Indian viewers agedbetween 18-35 years and will feature contemporary movies thathave beenbox office hits in their home countries. The films will be subtitled in English.

Shantonu Aditya, CEO of UTV subsidiary V&S Broadcasting, said: 'The non-Indian language movie segment is estimated to be worth $384m (Rs15bn)by 2009 and the launch of World Movies is an initiative to tap this growing market.'

At the same time, Palador Pictures has announced its association with Tata Sky's pay-per-view Showcase channel. Palador has bought the legal rights to nearly 1,000 world cinema titles. The exclusive tie-up with Tata Sky, a joint venture between the Tata Group and Star, will present carefully chosen, award-wining US, European and Asian films from Oct 12.

Showcase will screen eight titles from the Palador library over five weeks, including filmsfrom Akira Kurosawa, Jim Jarmusch,the Pang Brothersand Wong Kar-wai.

Gautam Sikhnis, Palador's founder and managing director, said: 'We have worked hard to create a collection of the best-of-the-best movies from across the world. Now the task of taking them to the discerning Indian viewers is made easy with Tata Sky's satellite television service.'

Palador Pictures invested over $4m to acquire legal rights to nearly 1,000 English and foreign-language film titles in the world cinema category. The company has raised private investment of $6m with a revenue target of $20m by March 2009.

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