Organised by Studio Systems, the 2nd annual DVD Entertainment India Summit held at the Taj Land‘s End Mumbai was attended by bigwigs and stakeholders across the value chain of the Indian Home Entertainment Industry including companies like Excel, Shemaroo, Moser Baer, Eros, Ultra, Big Home Entertainment, SaReGaMa, Sony Home Entertainment, 70mm, Planet M, Adlabs, Philips India, Krunal Music, Shethia Audio Visuals, Fountain Music, AP International & Rudraa Entertainment amongst others.
The conference addressed a broad spectrum of topics related to the DVD business including Publishing, Content Development, Marketing & Retailing, Compression Formats, Authoring, Replication, DVD Rentals and Piracy.
Some figures & stats shared during the conference
India
210 Million Households
125 Million TV population
85 Million Color TV households
75 Million Cable & Satellite homes
31 Million homes with DVD/VCD Players (total)
14 Million DVD players
15 Million Color TV additions expected
8.1 Million PC Sales in India in 2007 – (of which 6.25 Million PCs are with DVD drives)
The key milestone event that was referred across all the discussions was the entry of Moser Baer and the new pricing structure in the market that has brought a lot of attention to the home entertainment space. A new phrase was coined during the sessions, ‘The Pre Moser Baer era and the Post Moser Baer era”
Moser Baer COO G Dhananjay shared, “The rationale to the aggressive pricing is to put people into the habit of buying legal. It is about making things affordable. Short term it may be painful but long term it will build the market. Currently the addressable market size is 30 Million VCD/DVD players with per capita consumption being 1, in 2 years time, the addressable market size will be 60 million VCD/DVD players and we are going to drive the per capita consumption to 5/6 films, the market is going to increase by 10x.”
While Shemaroo‘s Hiren Gada appreciated the consumer attention that the new pricing and marketing blitzkrieg has brought to the home video segment, he also offered words of caution that too much of commoditization of the movie viewing experience may harm the ecosystem. He remarked, “Content is at the core of the Home Video business and it is all about the viewing experience. The new pricing strategy has indeed brought a lot of attention to the business, but our perspective is that with margins squeezing, things get difficult for players in the value chain including the retailers, distributors and the film trade too.”
Gada continued,”The focus has to be on value addition, on how we can add bonus elements including Game Discs themed around the movie, featurettes, director‘s comments, creation of the VFX, trailers, deleted scenes etc.”
Sony Home Entertainment‘s N. Muthu too was vocal about the need for value addition. He also shared that, “While most of the business here is around film based content, the non film based content space is virtually untapped.”
“Internationally a lot of TV content does extremely well on the Home Entertainment front, shows like Friends, Desperate Housewives, Lost etc, why can‘t we revive some of the best shows on Indian TV and get them onto home video. I am sure if someone did Shah Rukh Khan‘s first TV series Fauji on Home Video there would be buyers. Ditto there could be a best of CID, or best of Aahat, or even all the popular reality and format series could make good sales too” he pointed out.
Muthu further stated that besides Film & TV content there were various genres such as health & fitness, education, sports etc that had a huge potential market if they were packaged, presented and marketed correctly.
Excel Home Videos Marketing Head Aziz Pitalwalla in his presentation shared that the “International content DVD pricing mostly targeted to SEC A+, SEC A and upper segments and that the pricing was a derivate of the quantities”
He also pointed out that although windows around the globe are shrinking, local content windows are currently amongst the shortest in the world.
“Domestic release windows are unstructured and sometimes even eat into potential revenue streams viz. Home Video into Theatrical and Satellite into Home Video. Windows will need to be restructured to ensure space for entry of new revenue streams viz. Rental, VOD, PPV, DTH, Terrestrial, etc.” shared Pitalwalla.
The session on DVD Players & Content Marketing at retail had speakers including Philips India‘s Sanjiv Nimkar, Planet M CEO Ajay Mehra sharing insights.
Talking about what kept the DVD market ticking, Philips India‘s Sanjiv Nimkar shared that
“India is the world‘s largest producer of movies with more than 800 films made every year. Movie watching at the multiplex is an expensive proposition and usually families will go out to see a selected few movies in a year, the rest will be seen on the other platforms including Home Video”
Nimkar did point out that while the market was currently driven by Price, the industry also needed to upgrade viewing pleasure for the consumer. “DVD players are now affordable to the Indian middle class which is now seeking value addition in the products”
Excel‘s Pitalwalla and Philips Nimkar reinstated the fact that the market in South India was the strongest for Home Video & DVD. “Consumers from the South & West are the first to catch on to value addition formats” shared Nimkar.
Planet M CEO Ajay Mehra shared good news. “Home Entertainment Software is the fastest growing category in our part of the business. With Software & Hardware prices going down, and the release windows shrinking, the sales have just shot up. 5 years ago, Home Entertainment was 5% of our revenues, today it is 36%”
“Home Entertainment products today occupy close to 30% of our retail space. We have around 150 locations operational in India and another 45 will commence ops in the next 6 months” he added.
Will the shifting of price paradigms kill into the rentals business? While a few players did caution that until release windows were planned properly there was a danger of rentals biz getting slackened, Moser Baer as well as Planet M both shared they were very sure that the rentals biz was there to stay and both companies were planning their foray into the rentals space.
“We feel that there are a few movies that a consumer wants to own, and there are quite a few he wants to watch. Consumer Per Capita buying can be pushed to 5/6 in a year but the rest of the movies will be rented and viewed” shared G Dhananjay.
Other issues discussed at the conference were Piracy, and how one could crack it. One way was to create parallel streams of distribution that could compete at the price:quality parity. Another interesting presentation by Vishal Desai offered a viewpoint that publishers could consider formats such as divx or Mpeg 4 to offer bonus features while the feature itself could be on Mpeg 2, making it possible to compete with pirates who are now offering four films on a DVD for prices as low as Rs 40/-
All in all the entire conference gave an insight into the growth of the home video business in India and indicated at greater growth ahead!
The evening culminated with the presentation of the DVD Awards 2007.