Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications
Thursday, Jun 17, 2004
Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Thursday, Jun 17, 2004 |
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Piracy Info-Tech - E-Commerce & E-Business Variety - Cinema e-cinema arrives to fight film piracy — Adlabs' digital tech fine-tunes distribution Gaurav Raghuvanshi
Singapore , June 16 EVER wondered why 42 per cent of Bollywood's revenues get leaked due to piracy? One of the main reasons for film piracy in India is the time that it takes for Bollywood films to reach smaller towns. Adlabs Films Ltd, the country's largest film processing company, has found a simple solution using digital technology and by the end of August, would have helped nearly 200 movie halls in B and C class cities to get films the day they are released. ``Over the last 14 months, we have already helped 130 cinema halls to upgrade to `e-cinema' using digital projection. The investment required per screen is Rs 10-12 lakh and is done entirely by us. The cinema owner is only required to share revenues for the next three years,'' Adlabs Chief Executive Officer (Digital Division), Dr Sunil Patil ,told Business Line. Explaining the chain, Dr Patil said that even the biggest Hindi flick is released with 300 celluloid prints. Given the total number of cinema halls in the country at over 16,000, it takes six months to a year for the last cinema hall in the chain to get a new release. Adlabs digitises every new film and downloads it into the servers of 130 cinema halls that it has helped retrofit with digital projectors and servers. That enables the viewers in small cities to watch the movies at the same time as their counterparts in the metros. Soon, the process is set to become faster with the company tying up with VSAT (very small aperture terminal{rcub} operators to download the content via satellite directly into the cinema hall's servers. ``People want to see the film when it is still fresh, preferably, on the first day itself. When it takes so long for the movie to reach them, the pirates step in with spurious prints,'' he said. According to a study by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), the film industry was losing 42 per cent of its revenues to piracy. After the advent of e-cinema, the occupancy in the halls of Maharashtra has gone up from 8 per cent to 43 per cent, Dr Patil said. The company has not only upgraded halls in smaller towns in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and West Bengal, it is also taking the concept to metros where people are not willing to shell out in excess of Rs 100 to watch a movie at a top multiplex. ``The highest ticket cost at an e-cinema is Rs 22. While we were focusing on class B and C cities, we realise that there is a demand in bigger cities as well. Accordingly, two e-cinema halls have been opened in Mumbai,'' Dr Patil said. Devdas was the first Hindi movie on which a pilot e-cinema run was conducted in Uttar Pradesh. On April 18 last year, The Hero, a love story of a spy became the first movie to be also distributed in digital format. Ever since, Adlabs has been digitising one movie every week, he said. Some of the recent flicks distributed digitally included Shahrukh Khan starrer Kal ho Na Ho and Saif Ali Khan-Priety Zinta starrer Hum Tum. The next on the line is Lakshya, which centres around the Kargil war.
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