The Rathikant Basu-promoted company has acquired exclusive rights to 15 NFDC movies including three of Satyajit Ray's films. Besides, it has rights to seven of Shakti Samant's movies.

Broadcast Worldwide has also acquired two screening rights to most of the Bangla movies. Said Basu, "There are 1,200 working titles, out of which 1,000 movies are worth showing. If a channel has rights to two-thirds of the movies, it can run it successfully."

Tara Talkies will air Bangla movies in the period between 1960s' to late '80s. This includes noted star Uttam Kumar's movies. "We will be a quality movie channel. We will be telecasting movies belonging to the golden era of Bangla cinema. The film industry in Bengal will get a boost with the launch of the channel," said Tara Bangla chief executive officer Buddhadev Guha.

The channel will be initially free-to-air but will go pay eventually. "If the channel catches up, we will go pay six months after launch," said Mr Guha.

Tara Bangla, Broadcast Worldwide's language channel, is beefing up its programming and introducing content which will have a mass appeal. The channel is being perceived as being more "middle class and intellectual."

Introducing movies is the first move to correct that. The channel has been airing a movie every day at 10.30 pm with a repeat telecast next day morning. "We have started telecasting movies since August 15. We will continue till December, the moment we launch the movie channel," said Mr Guha.

A retrospective of seven of Shakti Samant's movies will be aired during Durga Puja. Rituparno Ghosh is making two telefilms on women-centric issues exclusively for the channel. Earlier, it had telecast Mr Ghosh's award-winning movie Utsav. On September 30, it will show Buddhadev Dasgupta's award-winning movie Uttara.