The Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group (ADAG) is betting big on the home video rentals business and plans to set up a chain of 500 neighbourhood video stores across 31 Indian cities by March 2009.
ADAG firm Reliance Big Entertainment will roll out these stores after the successful pilot projects for this model across three cities ? Hyderabad, Pune and Chandigarh and a total of 20 stores. The rollout will be under the BigFlicks brand and the company hopes to garner Rs 1,000 crore in revenues from it in three years? time.
?Our model will consist of three segments ? the high networth individuals and NRIs who have access to high speed broadband and can download movies or rent them on the net, the 40 million net connected homes and at the base end there will be the neighbourhood stores. Our aim will be to get the members of our neighbourhood stores to also move up the value pyramid in time,? Rajesh Sawhney, president, Reliance Big Entertainment told FE.
The BigFlicks argument is that of the total movie market, as much as 75% is by way of theatrical release in India and only 7-8% is through home video, whereas this is quite different in the US, where as much as 55% of the market is home video, with 20% by way of theatrical release. BigFlicks will aim at exploiting the untapped potential of the market in India. The 20 million NRIs can easily access Indian movie content by downloading them or renting them on the Net on the BigFlicks.com platform.
ADAG?s strategy is to have exhibition and distribution of cinema on the Adlabs platform and keep movie production, music, home video, studios and animation under the Reliance Big Entertainment umbrella.