TekChakra.com

I still dont get it. While I admire Rajshri andPNC for being bold enough to offer entire bollywood movies as paid downloads from their websites, I still dont see the business sense in doing so at such a high price.  While it does make some sense to simultaneously release in Theatres and Online - to satisfy immediate cravings of Bollywood fans world over - specially for over-hyped movies, I dont see this working as a good money spinner for movies that have been around for a long while - and not at the price of $9.99 to $14.99.

True, they will reach Indians all over the globe who want to so desperately see Bheja Fry, but would desis cough up $9.99 to $14.99 for digital download versions, instead of purchasing a physical copy that they can cherish and keep on their DVD shelf? Would you pay $14.99 for a bunch of bits comprising a 400MB to 1.4 GB file size that you will probably delete to free up disk space in less than a year?

Also, the download will probably take the average broadband user at least 5 hours to download, but information on the Bheja Fry page on Rajshri.com says 1.5 hours download time at a 1 mbps connection - which is correct… but just how many people have a 1 mbps line? I didnt try to do this download - but if Rajshri’s servers are hit hard (which is highly unlikely - causing the downloads to crawl and probably take over 24 hours to happen).

It also just doesnt make any sense to me as to why Rajshri insists on inserting pesky popup ads and jarring ads even while showcasing paid products. Please spare us the ordeal of having to close your screensaver ads if you want us to buy your digital download.

The fact that Rajshri has cluttered their entire site with Google Adsense ads and popup ads - goes to show that they are not making much money at all with the paid model, and hence have to resort to other means.

Further, I dont want to encourage piracy here, but 700 mb versions of Bheja Fry and many other Bollywood movies are available readily on Bit Torrent sites for a long time now - and will probably download within a short span of time owing to the distributed P2P downloading nature of the Bit Torrent system.

My take - Rajshri should make a bold move and offer a whole bunch of bollywood movies for completely free download. These should be compeltely ad supported - with maybe about 3 minutes of ads for every hour, and having a premium sponsors logo appear in the top corners, and also probably consider having an ad-bar strip appear at the bottom - like you see on those local cable tv run channels. These free movie downloads should also contain ads that talk about Rajshir’s upcoming or premium subscription service - to which users can subscribe on a monthly basis and get access to x number of downloads package. (watchout senventymm) . They can also use these free versions to advertise movies that are available as a paid download. But, please please dont make the mistake of pricing it at $9.99 to $14.99 - specially when this is something so new for most of us. Bring it down to around $2.99 per download for ad-supported content. And yes, if the movie DRM file does get cracked and passed around on torrent - atleast the advertisers will benefit. So, thats a good pitch for the advertisers. Lets not even get into the topic of superdistribution here, as Rajshri can struggle with that later.

For those who are not aware, “superdistribution” is a highly viral way to get your digital content out by encouraging purchasers to share the content further by recommending it to their friends in exchange for a small slice of the revenues earned by further marketing it to others.

Rajshri has also been recently misquoted by Business2.0 as the Youtube of India, as we can all very well see that they do not have the slightest hint of Web2.0 anywhere on their website.

I think Rajshri is making a move that is somewhat in the right direction, but needs tuning to work - in price and methodology. They certainly have the content, but do they have the intelligence and guts to be the first risk takers? Their Alexa ranking has been dropping as the inital “new hype period” passed by in April 2007, and since then the traffic has been on a steady decline.

Quoting a much tired and wired cliche: content is King, but distribution is King Kong.

— admin    Filed under: Uncategorized