Shemaroo acquires 50% stake in Dominiche; forays into $10 bn Astro content market

Shemaroo Entertainment has announced that it has inked a strategic tie-up with Dominiche Productions, acquiring 50 per cent stake in  the production company. With this, Shemaroo will expand its content portfolio with 400+ hours of content produced by the company.

Dominiche Productions was founded one and a half years ago by Adarsh Gupta and Utpal Vaishnav.

The synergistic partnership will allow Dominiche to leverage Shemaroo Entertainment’s distribution network both in India and abroad. The content will not be limited exclusively to Shemaroo’s distribution platform, but will also be available concurrently on other major providers such as Dish TV, Videocon D2H, NDTV App and Jio TV.

“At Shemaroo, we always believe in being at the forefront when it comes to venturing into new segments. A decade ago, we entered the devotion category and are now one of the leaders in this segment. With this strategic investment in Dominiche, we aim to reach out to a larger audience base by adding scalable new categories of the future like astrology to our bouquet of offerings,” said Hiren Gada, CEO, Shemaroo Entertainment.

Adarsh Gupta added here, “When we founded the company, we had a dream motivated by media doyen, Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch maintained that the future of media and content would be in niches." He further said that it is not the broad(casters) that would eat the niche, but rather the niche that would eat the broad(casters).

"We arrived at the name Dominiche to imply that we would dominate scalable niches of the future. We were never a one genre company. To achieve our dream, we needed to tie up with a powerhouse to achieve our dream quickly,” Gupta said.

The online appetite for Astrology content is growing at a pace of 27-28% annually and Dominiche productions is one of the biggest creators of content in this place boasting a wide array of astrological expertise including 270 experts with know how in Astro content such as Vastu Shastra, Vedic Astrology, Tarot Card Reading, palm reading, numerology, face reading, and aura reading.  

The content will also include predictions for the biggest events during the course of the year including IPL, Elections and World Cup. Viewers can solicitate these experts directly as well through DTH and online platforms.