Bigflix.com to invest Rs 450 cr for expansion

BIGFLIX


Mumbai-based entertainment service provider Bigflix.com, a venture of the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani group, today said it would invest about Rs 450 crore for expansion of its operation across the country over the next four years.
"We have fixed up a target of opening 500 offline movie rental outlets across the country during the next four years.

Out of the total target, about 100 outlets would be established over a period of six months," Bigflix.com Chief Operation Officer Kamal Gianchandani told reporters.

He said that the company would invest a minimum of about Rs eight lakh per outlet. "Each showroom has access to various movie titles across different languages across genres with convenient subscription plans," he said.

On the company's foray into the south Indian market, he said about 30 per cent of the outlets of the total target fixed would be set up in south India.

Kamal said the company's video rentals division now has access to 20,000 titles across 13 languages across genres. The membership of our outlets works all over India, so one can use the membership across all Bigflix stores, he said.

Besides Hindi and English, the outlets would offer a variety or regional content in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi across multiple movie genres of all eras -- from old to the latest, he said.

Explaining the difficulty in setting up a strong base in South India, Kamal said the official DVD is released only after one year of the film release, whereas in North India, the gap between the release and home video was between 8 and 12 weeks. "This long gap is the major factor that we cannot have a strong foothold in South India", he said.

Kamal said his company was in talks with producers across South India to reduce the gap. "Because of this gap, piracy is also higher here when compared to North India".

On the digital market scenario, he said the total market size in India was about Rs 850 crore, of which 65 per cent accounts to DVD movie rentals.

He said the home video market was all set to see a boom with entry of more players to woo consumers by making cinema accessible like never before.

Besides offering innovative, convenient and cost effective entertainment solutions to Indian consumers, the key players were going the whole hog to tap the estimated 25 million strong non-resident Indian population and an equally large non-indian audience consuming Indian movies, TV shows, music and more on a regular basis, he said.

With the home video segment accounting for nearly 50 per cent of the filmed entertainment business in developed markets like US, Canada and UK, who constitute over 70 per cent of total global online movie revenues, the digital entertainment business through its video-on demand service was witnessing a new horizon in its growth path, he added.