Online Movie Rental Business - Aiming For Rs. 300 Crore
Thanks to national players such as Anil Ambani’s Bigflix, Bangalore-based Seventymm and Delhi-based Movie Mart, the online movie rental business will see an investment of more than Rs 600 crore over the next three years up from the current Rs 40 crore. The plan is to increase the number of subscribers to around 12 million from the current 110,000. Most subscription plans start at Rs 300 a month and gets to watch unlimited number of DVDs, home-delivered.
BigFlix for instance has opened 80 stores across 10 cities, including the metros, and plans to invest Rs 400 crore over three years with plans to open 500 stores.
“There are around 48 million homes that have DVD players. Even if each such home rents two movies a month by paying Rs 100, there is huge potential. If one is able to get 10,000 subscribers in a city, then the business becomes cash positive in that city,” Subhankar Sarkar, COO, Seventymm told Business Standard.
Seventymm currently claims a subscriber base of 70,000 from operations in six cities, with plans to scale up to 20 cities by 2009.