India’s Zee Studios Announces NFT Drop on Polygon

India-based entertainment giant Zee Studios has teamed up with SaaS non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace provider NFTically to roll out its first NFT drop on Polygon, an Ethereum scaling solution.

In an announcement on Friday, Zee Studios said it is offering an NFT of a signed poster from its movie “Suraj Pe Mangal Bhari,” comedy-drama about a wedding detective whose background check on a prospective groom results in trouble for all involved. The NFT will be part of the “Zee Studios Collection,” powered by NFTically.

“It is a defining moment for us to become the first film studio in India to launch NFTs, and this initiative ties in with our future plans,” Shariq Patel, chief business officer at Zee Studios, said in the press release shared with CoinDesk. “Zee Studios will provide NFTs for cinema lovers and collectors through its repository of a strong lineup of film content.”

NFTs are unique, verifiable cryptographic tokens representing a wide range of tangible and intangible items like pictures and videos.

Established in 2012, Zee Studios, a subsidiary of Essel Group, is well known for distributing films across genres, budgets and languages in India. With Zee catching the NFT bug, other India-based entertainment giants may soon follow suit.

Recently, Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan launched his own digital collectibles through the NFT platform Beyondlife.club.

The crypto sub-sector has exploded this year on growing interest across the art, sport and media worlds. Data tracked by DappRadar show NFT sales rose to $2.47 billion in the first half of 2021 from a negligible amount a year earlier. OpenSea, the world’s largest NFT platform, saw a record volume of $1.9 billion in August versus $8 million in January, per Reuters.

NFTically is a global business-to-business, software as a service (SaaS) platform that allows celebrities, influencers, gamers, clubs and enterprises to launch their own white-label NFT store without needing to have any technical knowledge.

“We are excited to work closely with the Zee Studios team in launching their first-ever NFTs,” Toshendra Sharma, CEO and founder of NFTically said. “The NFT market, both in India and abroad, is soaring to new heights every day. Given our deep, longstanding relationship with art, culture, and emotion, India has the potential to be the epicenter of the NFT uprising.”