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Ticketing platform BookMyShow has ventured into the video-on-demand segment with its pay-per-view offering, also known as transactional video-on-demand (TVOD) service.
The platform, BookMyShow Stream, has been launched with 600 titles and the company plans to ramp it up to 2,000 titles over the next 9-12 months.
It has inked content partnerships with both Indian and international studios and has launched with key movies including Tenet, Wonder Woman 1984, horror fantasy flick The Craft: Legacy and Russian science fiction thriller Coma. The company said it will also be regularly premiering movies leveraging these partnerships.
Ashish Saksena, COO-Cinemas, BookMyShow, said: “ TVOD sits in the middle of the theatrical release window and the subscription video-on-demand release window for a film. It is a huge untapped market in India. This is a natural extension of our cinema ticketing business and marks our foray in the TVOD segment which is modelled in a manner that it respects the existing theatrical window for content.”
Besides BookMyShow’s mobile app and website, BookMyShow Stream will be available on Apple TV, Android TV, Firestick, Chromecast and desktop browsers. It will offer users features such as downloads, offline viewing and casting.
Talking about the content strategy, Saksena said: “Our strategy is to offer highly curated cinema offerings leveraging our partnership with Indian and international studios. Consumers will be able rent or buy a movie title that they may have missed watching at the theatres. At the same time we will also focus on offering international content that has not been released in Indian theatres. Over 40 per cent of the content on the platform will be exclusive to us.”
In-house platform
The company has developed the platform in-house and accelerated the launch within eight months of inception. It comes at a time when consumers are increasingly adopting digital platforms for purchases, payments and entertainment.
Consumers will have the option to rent a movie for a finite duration or buy it for unlimited access. The prices will range from ₹40 to ₹700, depending on the title.
The company’s foray in this space comes at a time when there are a slew of Indian and international players vying to get a share of the Indian consumers' eyeballs. However, Saksena pointed out that the TVOD space in the country is still a sort of white space that does not have many players besides the global biggies such as Google and Apple.
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