Both movie and music industry in India have been the sufferers due to the technology revolution that hit the world with piracy and easy free downloads available to the masses. Soon the rates of CD’s started to fall and one saw that the roadside hawkers shifted their business from selling food to selling cd’s and dvd’s.
Online Movie downloads getting mainstream?
Now the music and movie industry seems to have woken up to the fact that digital is the way to go. So last year rajshri.com opened its floodgates by releasing movies online for downloading at the same time as the actual release of the movie in the theatres! Rajshri released ‘Vivah’ online and in theatres at the same time. ‘Vivah’ was sold at $10 per download and has clocked 6,500 downloads most of which was bought by NRI audience.
Even BigFlicks.com the Reliance backed movie entertainment portal which was rumoured to be launched as a dvd rental portal launched as a movie downloading service. Now its seems Seventymm.com too which is traditionally in the business of dvd rentals is looking at introducing a movie downloads service.
Till now we have been talking about movies what about music?
Shahrukh Khan’s latest movie Om Shanti Om has gone ahead and released its music online available for downloads. This is probably the first time a main stream movie like om shanti om has made such a move. Om Shanti Om’s music album will be available for full downloads on mobile handsets and digital media including itunes across 23 countries including India, Singapore, UK, US, UAE, Sri Lanka and Malaysia.
What about the cost of download for Om shanti Om?
The cost per download will be different in different markets so the download per song will cost 2-3 dhirams in UAE, while it will cost 1.99 pounds on the O2 network. The downloading price in India is around Rs 25 a song, with additional download costs on mobile handsets.
Conclusion: Though at Rs.25 per song download is expensive but i think the music and movie industry have always priced music and movies higher than normal. Even when CD’s came out they were priced at Rs.500-1000. I feel with digital downloads the cost of production and distribution falls tremendously and i would believe in the future too the cost of such downloads will fall as well. I feel moving on more and more movies and music companies would take the digital route for distributing their content and for sure the future is digital though i think the music and movie industry would have to rethink its pricing.
I think you are bang on. The downloads will be predominantly from outside india in the next one or two years and then the floodgates will open here. easy low cost or no cost broad band connectivity, lower movie pricing, bigger PC monitors( LCD TV- COMP MONITORS) would be the tipping points.
Downloading everything is the future. It is practically here now.