Wikipedia defines Bollywood as:
Bollywood is the informal name given to the popular Mumbai-based Hindi language film industry in India. The name is a conflation of Bombay, the old name of Mumbai, and Hollywood, the center of the United States film industry. Though some purists deplore the name (arguing that it makes the industry look like a poor cousin to Hollywood), it seems likely to persist and now has its own entry in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Whatever the purists might say, Hindi film industry typically sees huge amounts of money being traded every year. Of course, there would be many claimaints to the ever increasing pie. Given the fact that Indians seem to have a fixation for “song-n-dance” sequences; we all seem to lap it up with gusto.
However, more than that, I would focus on content delivery. Every year we get to see an astounding 1000 films made every year. ( Thats a rough estimate). Most of them are B grade stuff- that you would like to be caught dead watching. The others, so called big budget productions, have a lot of money riding on the “appeal” of the stars.
In recent times, producers are increasingly turning towards advertisers to sell the film as a commodity. The whole package is splashed across hoardings, multiplexes and increasingly we get to see tie ups with mobile phone companies for ring tones.
The newer content delivery is going to be Broadband.
The so called “triple play” with telephone, video and cable intertwined would soon start streaming across homes. Yet, is this model going to be a revenue earner?
The telecom companies are hoping so. With voice margins falling, it doesn’t make any sense to stick on the same revenue model. Data is the way to go. However, with the pathetic infrastructure and REAL last mile hassles, it would take time to bridge the “digital” divide in the near future.
Still, the broadband can allow pay per view or downloads based on rentals. Just like you would rent it from a video store. They could either stream the video, a narrow possibility because the technology isn’t really refined. Then of course, the telecom companies would have to invest in heavy bandwidth to individual homes. The other way could be via peer to peer file sharing; if it is legalised in India.
Whatever the distribution model maybe, it would definitely help to curb piracy and scale up serious money in unorganised Bollywood. All that matters is the way they scale up.
A potential hindrance seems to be huge funds being raised and lined up for multiplexes. I feel that broadband may not yet threaten the traditional cinemas; rather the two may co exist side by side. Still, the future seems to be exciting; even if the content is seriously dumbed down.
In this context, Reliance’s acquistion of Adlabs needs to be seen. Reliance has it’s aces up it’s sleeve. They would go to any extent to capture the market by virtue of being late entrants. Infact none of the other two pan Indian players have their plans ready for content delivery. BSNL is dilly dallying for content; Airtel as usual would scale up only when needed. Though, I must admit that their broadband tariffs for unlimited downloads is indeed appealing to me!
This year, hopefully, Reliance would go in for the big bang launch. If and when they feel the heat in landlines.
This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Related posts:
- Entertainment and Telecom Should we broaden our focus on technology as a whole and include other hip happenings? I have searched for clues...
- Entertainment redefined For months on end, I was toying with the idea of writing on the way “Broadband” in India could redefine...
- Tomorrow’s broadband I am talking of the “REAL” broadband. For months, I have been scratching my head about the utility of broadband....
- Content driving future growth It’s becoming increasingly clear that Reliance infocomm wants to straddle the telecom industry. Broadband rollout has been very slow- at...
- What Broadband can do for India? What Broadband can do for India? Over the past few months, there has been intense speculation and excitement over broadband....
- Recall 2005 Part 2 Broadband Singularly, we can call 2005 as the “year of broadband”. Far from a crappy dial up we have jumped...
- Year 2006 forecast It’s difficult to forecast anything for the new year. Specially at the rate at which the technology is changing. In...
- More Mess in Indian Telecom More Mess in Indian Telecom The recent cabinet decision for the hike in the FDI needs to be put in...
- Recall 2005 Part 3 Miscellaneous: Finally, a ring side view of the Telecom circus. Aptly proved by concerned people in Department of Telecom indulging...
- Dire Straits for BSNL Broadband This post is self explainatory What all I had been crowing about all these months. The “target” for “millions of...
[...] 1)Entertainment [...]