Bollywood movies: reducing time between release date and world television premier date
05. Apr, 2010
I was bit surprised when a day before yesterday I noticed an advertizing on one of the popular Television channel announcing they will be airing a world TV premier of Veer – a much hyped epic movie, starring a big star such as Salaman Khan. The surprising bit here was the fact that this movie was released barely a month ago. But then I realized that this trend is not a recent one; rather it has started may be several years back – a movie, hit or flop, gradually comes on a television. It is interesting to observe that the time between a movie’s release date for theaters and its subsequent television premier is shrinking pretty fast; though there are variations in this period for various movies depending upon its status tag – a hit or a flop.
If we analyze this trend a bit closely, movie business normally has two well known revenues models – through initial theatrical release and later through selling rights to a TV channel. With recent high proliferation of internet and easy availability of pirated VCD/DVD across the breadth and the length of our country has been one of the major forces behind this shrinking timeline between a movie’s original theatrical release and its gradual appearance on TV channel. We find pirated VCD/DVD easily available in the market, though it is considered to be illegal. Similarly, there are numerous websites streaming movies online with many of them having a dubious status. In other words, laws have been and will be there but then it is always impossible to enforce them for many a reasons. We probably have to accept that as the movie business is getting bigger the movie piracy business is also getting stronger with the passing time. Although we see lot of anti-piracy ads and campaign promoted even by well known movie star with the slogan “piracy is a crime”, the strongly established pirated movie network shows very little or rather no respect for such efforts.
With all these in the background, it is a wise business move from movie producers to utilize the second channel of revenue by selling rights of a movie to a TV channel before it is too late; it is also a win-win situation for a TV channel, as TV still is a medium with larger reach as compared to internet. There remains a mass, still dependent on TV channels to watch movie and this ensures a TV channel to attract sufficient advertisement revenues.
I think with the passing time, the time difference discussed above may shrink drastically depending upon business-maths of the forces involved. This also proves that a famous phrase – “survival of the fittest – is universally applicable; even to businesses.
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