State of Online Video Content Distribution in India
In this series, we will be looking into the state of online video content distribution in India. Many big and small players have entered to cash in the opportunity. We will be analyzing the opportunity as well as studying the business model of players like Saavn, BigFlicks, 2DMovie etc. We will also analyze if distributing the contents online can really check piracy.
India produces largest number of movies in the world. Apart from that, there are hundreds (if not thousands) of teleserials, documentaries, news content etc. Internet provides a platform to reach Indian audience globally. For many years these contents are illegally available in many sites with a disclaimer that we don’t upload these contents, we just aggregate the content.According to an estimate Bollywood is losing $4 billion (Rs. 16,000 crore) annually to piracy.
Inspired by what Chris Anderson did for his book The Long Tail, I googled for “watch hindi movies online”. Out of the list I selected Video Duniya for my study. This site carries the disclaimer which I mentioned earlier. I went to its Hindi section and noted the number of views for each movie. I have taken only 60% of the number of views (all time view) shown in Video Duniya. This is to take into account that all hits to the movie link may not get converted into views. I collected data for about 250 films released since 1970. Since I did not get sufficient data for all the years, I chose to plot the graph only for the movies released on or after 2001. I selected top 8 movies for each year based on the all time views.
Now lets study the graph. Total number of views for 2008 movies is 283,014. It is lesser than expected because we have just completed 3 months in this year. As the time passes I would see that number increasing. The graph from 2007 to 2001 looks to me like a long tail. 25% of all views is for the movies released from 2001 to 2004. So old movies can still make lot of money. I would strongly think this would be the same case for other video contents especially teleserials and documentaries.
Adding dollars to numbers. Based on the information from Video Duniya, movies released in 2007 were viewed 598,553 times. If each view was charged/monetized by $2, the total sum becomes $1,197,106, which is around Rs. 4 crore. Movies released from 2001 to 2004 got a combined view of 523,342, which is comparable to the the total views in 2007. This is just the tip of the iceberg. I have selected only top 8 movies for each year. So now I see why people are rushing to capitalize this market.
We plan to analyze some of the main players in online video content distribution like Saavn, BigFlicks, 2DMovie, Nautanki, Rajshri, Watch India and Tinselvision. By no means we claim this list is complete. Please let us know if we have missed the name of any company which works in this space. One final note, this study is not meant to be used in your PhD.
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