BookMyShow checks in to India's crowded streaming party with live events

Sunburn Home Festival, the virtual edition of the electronic dance music festival, is among the first events BookMyShow Online will stream live.

In the streaming video rush comes a new creature this week: BookMyShow (BMS) Online is a streaming platform for live events. Sunburn Home Festival, the virtual edition of Asia’s biggest electronic dance music festival, is among the first events it will stream live on July 10-11. You can pay Rs 99 for a day or Rs 199 for both days.

BMS Online also conducts a virtual musical talent discovery show with Kailash Kher as judge. The finalé will be streamed live on July 7. Other upcoming events include the India shows of Doncaster (South Yorkshire) band Bang Bang Romeo and London-based band Electric Enemy. There are theatre workshops with veterans like Puneet Issar, Rohini Hattangadi, Rakesh Bedi, and Anant Mahadevan. These are among the first of many concerts, events, and workshops lined up by India’s largest ticketing portal in its bid to ride out the pandemic storm.

In a normal year, BMS sells 200 million tickets of movies, plays, and other events. “We have always been the de-facto place for consumers to discover out-of-home,” says Albert Almeida, chief operating officer, BMS.

To stay connected with its user base during the lockdown, BMS began “delivering content and experiences at home”, says Almeida. It facilitated the discovery, registration, and reach for over 750 events, such as Live From HQ (music, comedy, spoken word), Theatre Live (drama, monologues, theatre, reading), Vodafone #RechargeForGood (music), among others. Close to 4 million people saw these events in the first month of the lockdown, claims the firm. Currently close to half a million viewers log into these virtual events every week. Note that all of these were free. “We saw great affinity for comedy, music, international artistes, and upskilling through master classes,” says Almeida.

Armed with these insights, BMS started moving some of these events to pay in the latter part of June. Now about two-thirds all such events are behind paywall. With BMS Online, everything is pay.

Shemaroo plans Bollywood streaming service, looks past Netflix model

India's media and entertainment market is estimated to expand to more than Rs 2 trillion by 2020 from Rs 1.5 trillion in 2017.

Shemaroo Entertainment Ltd has transitioned from renting DVDs to streaming movies online -- while the business model move may sound familiar, the company doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as an Indian  Netflix  Inc.
Shemaroo holds the rights to 3,500, mostly older Bollywood films, through which it earns TV licensing fees as well as advertising revenue from nearly 40 YouTube channels. While the Mumbai-based company is planning to start its own streaming application in the next six-to-nine months, throwing it into competition with Netflix and at least six other local and international rivals, it doesn’t see this as its endgame.


“Given the opportunities that exist in the market, we want to grow our revenue fivefold in five years,” Hiren Gada, the company’s chief executive officer, said in an interview in Mumbai. “The best way to play the digital boom is to offer services on all platforms in all forms.”

Shemaroo aims to grow its movie catalogue 3 to 5 per cent every year, and is looking to license out its library to other online platforms. While Gada said the company may produce “some content,” it sees controlled spending on content and online platform maintenance as a key difference between its planned app and Netflix.


India’s media and entertainment market is estimated to expand to more than Rs 2 trillion ($30 billion) by 2020 from Rs 1.5 trillion in 2017, buoyed by robust growth in digital formats, according to a report by Ernst & Young LLP in March. With its population of about 1.3 billion, India is among the most important markets for Netflix, which had 5 million subscribers as of December 31. The country’s online media boom has also drawn Amazon.com Inc and Viacom Inc, among others.

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