(29 August 2007 6:00 pm)

MUMBAI: Anil Ambani is betting big money in his entertainment business. BigFlicks.com, a part of the Reliance ADA group, will pump in $100 million over five years.

BigFlicks.com has launched its on-demand movie download service. It offers films in Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi and Kannada that will be available for either download to own at a fee or for free streaming.

BigFlicks will be introducing its movie rental services through its online home delivery service as well as a network of retail shops. The roll out of these services across top ten cities will begin in September.

"We will be investing $100 million over five years in BigFlicks," said Reliance Entertainment president Rajesh Sawhney.

Besides India, the portal is also targetting the overseas Non Resident Indian (NRI) population. The company will offer download to rent and subscription services in its portfolio of operations as well.

The firm says that its USP is that it is the first and only online movie library with the largest regional content. The download price ranges from $2 - $15.

BigFlicks.com will offer 2000 titles in the first year and there will be revenue sharing arrangements with the content owners. The site is also looking at acquiring Indian television content apart from looking to connect with subscribers in America, UK, Canada, Middle East, Australia and South East Asia.

The site aims to have an easy interface and navigability. It offers downloading speed with bit rates of 1500 kbps.

Said Sawhney, "Our vision is to build a scalable business model that brings entertainment to all kinds of consumers and homes through a multi channel distribution platform across broadband, Internet and home delivery and retail infrastructure. We also believe that BigFlicks.com will become the window of Indian entertainment content to the world. With over one billion people on the net, and increasingly on broadband, the portal offers an opportunity for Indian movie industry to reach out to the audience across the world: in the US, in Canada, in Europe, in Japan and even in South America.

Bigflicks.com is looking to set up retail home video stores across the country, said COO Kamal Gianchandani.

By the end of this financial year there will be 100 stores in 10 cities. In three years there will be around 500 stores in 50 cities. They will function as neighbourhood stores.

There will also be call centres for home delivery. The first stores will launch in Hyderabad, Chandigarh and Pune next month. The aim is to find the demand for different genres, consumption patterns and habits and plan accordingly.

When asked about the price points for rentals for these stores, Gianchandani says that it is being worked upon. He, however, praised the efforts of firms like Moser Baer which have worked towards bringing down the prices of home video products.

"This strikes a blow against the piracy menace. About a third of our content in the retail stores will come from Hollywood and international titles. We will buy the rental license from firms like Excel Home Video. The stores will eventually have around 17,500 titles in total. Having said that we see ourselves as first being an online home video firm. A year from now around 65 per cent of our revenue will come from the online component. The offline activity is an extension and our prices will be competitive," he added.

As far as the online business is concerned, BigFlicks has partnered with Entricl, a company which provides content protection service through Digital Rights Management (DRM), issues end licenses on downloadable content and provides access control to prevent misuse of content.

The content serving platform of Entriq is a download manager platform which allows the user to download movies from BigFlicks.com. The progressive downloading feature of this application allows users to download and watch movies at the same time. Ten minutes into the downloading process, a user can start watching movies while the download progresses.

It has also appointed content delivery network Limelight Networks as the exclusive provider of streaming content delivery services for Bigflicks.com that will enable the site to deliver its vast library of full length Indian movies, music videos, TV shows, documentaries, and other premium video content via the Internet to a global audience.

Bigflicks.com will later launch an online mail order service for the Indian market.

It has two revenue models. In the streaming model, the content (including films/songs) are available for free viewing. A user with a fast broadband connection can view them instantly. Ads will support this model.

The other is download to own model where downloads are available for a fee of anywhere between $2 and $9.

Moreover users can watch a movie on one PC and make copies on three other PCs. In the future it will also allow for burning of movies to DVD. Very soon the downloaded content could be transferred into mobile or an iPod besides offering premium quality DVD content without the retailer and wholesaler margins at a competitive price, the company said.