MUMBAI: After son James Murdoch, media baron Rupert Murdoch has resigned as director of his U.K. media group News International, NewsCorp Investments, and Times Newspaper Holdings, a move that has been described as corporate house cleaning process.

The BBC said that he has also resigned from boards of a number of subsidiaries in America, Australia and India, where it runs the Star TV network.

The move comes in the backdrop of News Corp?s announcement to separate the profitable film and television business from the publishing business, which has been a drag on the media conglomerates balance sheet.

News International, which publishes The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun newspapers, has become a headache for News Corp due to its exposure to the phone hacking scandal, which led to the closure of News of the World tabloid besides arrest of company official and millions of pounds in damages to the victims.

More than that, the scandal has besmirched the image of Murdoch?s and prevented News Corp from making a complete takeover of BSkyB in which it holds 39 per cent.

Incidentally, in February this year James Murdoch had to quit the the boards of News Corp?s newspaper companies as well as BSkyB board due to the scandal. The Junior Murdoch has since moved to US as deputy COO of News Corp.

"I wanted to let you know that Rupert Murdoch has resigned as director of a number of companies, including NI Group Limited, known to most of you as News International, and Times Newspapers Holdings Limited," News International head Tom Mockridge reportedly said in an email.

"As you may be aware, Rupert resigned from a number of UK boards, including News Group Newspapers and Times Newspapers Limited, some time ago. He has also stepped down from more than a dozen boards of companies with interests in the US, Australia and India."

The move has fuelled speculation that Murdoch is looking to sell off his UK publishing business in order to rid himself of the scandal menace.

MUMBAI: Star China Media, owned by powerful Chinese media investment fund China Media Capital and media conglomerate News Corporation, has formed a joint venture company with Puji Capital, a Shanghai-based investment and asset management firm with a focus in lifestyle, media, property, and consumer industries.

Puji Star Media, the new joint venture based in Shanghai, will focus on investment and development of international TV content for the Star platform in China.

The venture will invest in internationally inspired TV content and advertising with particular interest in the Americas, Europe, Japan, Korea, and among others tailored for the local Chinese viewers onto the Star TV?s platform including various types of content made for TV and produced for the Chinese market.

Star China CEO Tian Ming said, "Puji?s vast experience in value creation for shareholders coupled with their strong international media network and platforms allows us to be well positioned to the tremendous opportunity that lies ahead for us in the China media market."

Michael Chien from Shanghai and Jotaro Nonaka from Japan, managing partners of Puji Capital, said in a joint statement, "We are honored to partner with Tian Ming and his team who has turned Star TV to a profitable company within a short time with his creativity and solid understanding to capture the passion of Chinese viewers and its commercial value.

"Star China is a very distinctive TV platform that enjoys many content and distribution advantages over its competitors for China market. We believe that Puji Star Media will provide a very unique ?One Stop Gateway? for those who wish to optimize and maximize their business through Star TV?s vast coverage in the China market."

China?s TV market experienced tremendous growth over the past years, with broadcasting revenues increasing $15 billion in 2005 to $37 billion in 2010 and enjoyed a 22 per cent increase in 2011.

The Chinese media, specifically television content, is growing at annual rate of 27 per cent and produced $19 billion of advertising revenue in 2011.

MUMBAI: Prime Focus Technologies (PFT) has further extended its content localisation offering with a raft of language dubbing services.

This new language dubbing service complements PFT?s existing subtitling-captioning service offering that is already captioning over 10,500 hours of TV and film content every year. 

Founder and CEO of Prime Focus Technologies Ramki Sankaranarayanan said, "With rapid globalisation, international content is in increasing demand by a geographically dispersed, digitally interactive consumer base. Leveraging our global digital pipeline, language dubbing is an important addition to our growing suite of powerful Clear-led content operation services for global clients. We are very pleased to see our clients already embracing this offering which clearly presents enhanced revenue growth opportunities."

With a roster of 300 voiceover artists and 50 scriptwriters, PFT can provide dubbing services in over 20 international languages and all Indian languages. PFT?s services include scriptwriting; cultural and language disaster checks; dialogue adaptation; voice casting and audition; dialogue recording and editing; M&E track creation; audio mixing; video editing; and Dolby mastering.

The new service is managed by a client servicing team with many years of content localisation experience and leverages Clear, PFT?s award-winning hybrid cloud content operations platform, to handle assets, automated QC, approvals, workflows, delivery and archiving of the content.

PFT is already providing over 250 hours of dubbing services every month to its clients like National Geographic Channel, Reliance Big, Star TV and Zee TV. 

MUMBAI: News Corp?s India affiliate, Star TV, has bagged the BCCI media rights for international cricket played in India for a whopping Rs 38.51 billion, surprising all who expected the joint venture entity, ESPN Star Sports, to bid.

Star India bet higher than the only rival bidder Multi Screen Media (formerly Sony Entertainment Television India) for the six-year broadcast and digital rights till 2018. MSM, IPL?s official broadcast rights holder, bid Rs 37 billion to back up its plans to launch a sports channel.

Star will cough up Rs 401.154 million per match, a huge increase compared to Rs 312.50 million that Nimbus Communications was paying for every match when its contract was prematurely terminated by the BCCI last year for non-payment of broadcast rights fee.

According to sources in the BCCI, only five companies had bought the bidding documents with only MSM and Star placing their bids before the marketing committee that had met in Chennai to open the bids. The ones who bought bid documents include Zee, ESPN Software India, and Times Internet, which intended to bid only for the digital rights.

The contract between BCCI and Star TV will cover a total of 96 matches which includes visit by teams like Australia, England, South Africa and Sri Lanka. It also includes domestic events like Ranji Trophy, Duleep Trophy and the Irani Trophy.

The most interesting part of the bidding was that ESS, which operates Star Sports, Star Cricket and ESPN, did not submit the bid even though it bought the tender documents.

?I am glad to announce that Star TV won the bid for six years. The total bid amount is about Rs 3,851 crores (Rs 38.51 billion) for the six year period covering 96 matches. The BCCI is very happy that the BCCI rights are fully evaluated and now I think fully priced,? BCCI president N Srinivasan said, announcing the winning bid.

Star TV India CEO Uday Shankar said the broadcaster would work with ESS to jointly develop the content. ?BCCI is a great property and we are overjoyed to have an opportunity to develop it further. It was decided amongst ESPN Star Sports, ESPN and Star that Star would bid for the rights and if Star were to win the rights it would be exploited in collaboration with ESS,? Shankar said in a statement.

For ESS, which has platforms across television, Internet and mobile medium, the BCCI media rights will come as a booster shot. With the India rights expected to be housed under it, ESS can boast of having rights for three of the top four cricket boards which includes Australia and England excluding South Africa, which is owned by Ten Sports. It also holds the global rights for ICC events till 2015 besides Champions League Twenty20 commercial rights till 2017.

Commenting on the deal, ESPN Star Sports MD Manu Sawhney said, "ESS is very pleased that STAR has secured the BCCI rights for the period 2012 to 2018. It was decided by the ESPN STAR Sports (ESS) Board that the most preferred way for these rights is for STAR to bid with the understanding that should they win, they would utilize these rights in partnership with ESPN STAR Sports. We look forward to continue to enhance fans? engagement with the game.?

The BCCI had clubbed the digital with the TV broadcast rights, setting a floor price of Rs 322.5 million (Rs 312.5 million plus Rs 10 million for new media rights) per international game for category A and Rs 340 million (Rs 330 million plus 10 million for new media rights) per game for category B.

The new media rights, which were not part of the earlier rights package with Nimbus, had failed to draw attention as it was highly priced. The BCCI had twice floated tenders fixing base price at Rs 30 and Rs 20 million respectively.

India?s FTP at home for the period is as follows: