Mumbai, Maharashtra, India, 21st October 2019: Mumbai-based K Sera Sera is planning to conduct Pan-India survey to gather information about people living in remote areas and willing to watch free movies on a regular basis in a theatre near them.
The premise of conducting this survey is that only 2 to 3% of the Indian population actually get to see the movies that are produced. India has a population of 1.3 billion people but there are only 9,000 functional cinema theatres. What’s more, these cinema halls are present only in urban to tier II or at a max tier III cities. The sub-continent comprises approximately 725 Districts, 5400 Tehsils, 2.5L Gram panchayats, and 6.5L villages. This means that most of the movies never reach a major chunk of the population.
In addition to this, K Sera Sera notes that the maximum number of people who do watch new movies in a cinema hall in India, on an average, are hardly 2 to 3%. This is based on the fact that most blockbuster Bollywood or regional cinemas which does business of 300 Cr. and the average rates are being considered as Rs. 150, this translates to only 10 to 30 million people.
On the digital front, currently India has over 500 Million active smartphone users & by 2022 the expected numbers are likely to go beyond 750 million. Alongside, there are 450 million active Internet users; the same will be touching beyond 700 million by 2022. Though, India is marginally behind China in this front, there is a great potential for growth since the penetration level is hovering around just 40 to 45% of our total population.
Coming back to Cinema, piracy market in India is thriving because most of the new releases are on the internet almost on the release date itself and same is being watched by millions of people, either on internet or on their smartphones. Apart from movies, digital platforms also have many other Audio visual contents available to the viewers without any costs.
Talking about this survey, Prasanna Jagtap, Managing Director, K Sera Sera said, “The major chunk of this input business collection of cinema in India gets divided between Producers, Distributors & Artists. With the help of this survey, we would be in a position to find out the country’s approximate available market for Free Cinema Entertainment. This, in turn, will help us evolve newer means of reaching to the target audience at an absolutely grassroot level, support Industry and safeguard all stakeholders without falling prey to piracy market.”
