It’s a year since BIGFlix.com launched its online streaming business, and 10 months since the video rental business was soft launched. The full fledged launch of the rental business, particularly the retail stores, took place in May 2008. Still, the online business accounts for only 20 percent of revenues. so is the Video on Demand business struggling? MediaNama gleaned this from an interview with Kamal Gianchandani, COO of BIGFlix. We also spoke to him about targets, and content consumption trends, but he was rather reticent offering revenue numbers:

Video on Demand Business (Vod)
Revenues & Revenue Share
VoD accounts for 20 percent of current revenues, mostly through downloads since advertising was launched hardly a month ago. “We’ve just launched advertising from VDOpia, 15 days to a month ago, so its too early to talk numbers, but we knew this is an advertising dependent business, so have had to build pageviews. We’ve refrained from going out and securing advertisements until now.” BIGFlix has set an advertising-sales target of Rs. 10 crores by March 2009. For content downloads, they share 25-40 percent of revenue with content providers.
Isn’t that lower than Rajshri’s - which is at around 50 percent?
“In some cases we might extend it to 50 percent, in case of some titles. Each player will have a different take on this.”
Traffic
BIGFlix claims 50 million pageviews banner impressions (see update below)/month, and 3 million unique visitors….(ED: 17 pageviews per unique visitor is rather high, isn’t it?). They’re targeting 100 million pageviews/month by March 2009
Marketing Spends
BIGFlix intends to spend Rs. 5 Crores on advertising in the overseas market, with ads in 200 multiplexes.
Catalog
We have 1350 films, out of which 500 are regional. 25-30 percent of that is Malayalam. Hindi and Bollywood dominate. We’re planning to add 5000 films by the end of the financial year, of which 50-60 percent will be Hindi, tmayhe rest regional. Also looking to add Gujarati, Bengali and Oriya content.

More on content consumption trends and the Rental business -

Long Form vs Short Form Content
People still prefer to watch 3 hour movies on TV, not on the PC. While watching full movies online, they tend to jump - fast forward parts of the movie. They’re mostly consuming short form content - interviews, filmi masala, trailers, behind-the-scenes content. However, BIGFlix is not planning to produce its own content - they’re an aggregator, and will continue to source it from Independent producters. 75 percent of the films have been successful for us, while 25 percent have been duds. In case of downloads, adding a download manager have made it easier for users to download films, instead of starting from scratch.
Long Tail Content
We went into this business thinking only new movies would work, and the split of views would be 85-15 in favour of new movies. However, it’s more like 70-30, so older content is being watched.
Regional Content
It is star driven. Offline, Tamil and Telugu accounts for 80 percent of the market, while Malayalam and Kannad accounts for 20 percent. But perhaps because Malayalam Cinema struggles to get a proper release overseas, its working well for us - it alone accounts for 20 percent, while Tamil and Telugu are 50 percent of regional content views.
TV Shows
BIGFlix has 100 odd TV serials, and Astitva is getting a lot of views;* TV content is being viewed mostly by international viewers. Film content still dominates, but TV is good for stickiness.

Rental

Rental accounts for 80 percent of the business. BIGFlix has around 115 outlets and an online mail-order presence in 10 cities. They’ve launched the second phase of the rental business in May, and though the response, they say, has been “overwhelming”, they’re not willing to talk any numbers. BIGFlix has a catalog of 17000 titles, with 3000-4000 titles in each store, and the rest can be queued up online, whether from home or using the kiosks in stores.

They’ll roll out stores in B&C class towns next fiscal year. Gianchandani says that the difference between them at Showtime (Nimbus) and SeventyMM is that Showtime is only offline, while SeventyMM is an online-only mail-order service. BIGFlix is looking at scale, and both offline and online. They intend to spend Rs. 20 crores on advertising the domestic rental business.

Won’t having the offline presence have an effect on the break-even for the service?
“We’ve been conscious about the size of the retail space. It’s also the question of scale. If you do only online mail order service, you’re targeting a smaller segment. By the end of this financial year, we’ll be at 200 outlets. Around 50 of these outlets are inside Reliance WebWorlds”

Update from BIGFlix:

“We apologise for the miscommunication from our end with regards to the 50 million page views on BIGFlix.com. As per industry norms, we, at BIGFlix.com follow the refresh technique for serving of banners and advertising impressions. Hence these are 50 million banner advertisement impressions per month and not page views over a period of time.”

* - Update: BIGFlix does not stream Astitva, and we erroneously asked Gianchandani about it. I had both BIGFlix and competitor Rajshri.com open on the PC, and Rajshri has Astitva. Apologies for the error.

BIGFlix, Films, Reliance Entertainment
Tags: BIGFlix, Kamal Gianchandani, Reliance ADAG

1. Why does everything about Reliance has to be a Big Lie? 50 million pageviews? Come on. Alexa graph tells it all - http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/bigflix.com. At best they will have 250k pageviews per month, and even those going down by the day :(

   Posted by what | September 5, 2008, 1:15 pm

2. See,alexa reports aren’t standard and this is a well proven fact that they are way different from the actual traffic figures.You can still use such analytics for relative comparisons.
   BTW,this justification doesn’t at all mean that BIFFlix is actually having this much of traffic.
   I don’t know(can’t know) the exact traffic figures but my experience says that these figures are largely exaggerated.
   Even Techcrunch has about 7.5Mn pageviews so they can’t assume everybody so big foolish…

   Posted by Prashant | September 5, 2008, 11:48 pm

3. Well at least the Alexa stats can be used to understand their average page views per person, which hover around 7 and far from the 17 that Nikhil has pointed as required.

   Posted by flip | September 6, 2008, 12:14 am

4. Nikhil
   Some unsolicited suggestion…
   Stop putting only press releases on your website. You are supposed to be a journalist right, not a copy paster…so would appreciate some commentary, views etc…nobody reads your half baked analysis anyway-no offence meant but you clearly have not worked in equity analysis so that is not your skill set. if I wanted that, I would get it from a investment
   bankwgvvx rqgherog

   Posted by Web Monkey | September 6, 2008, 5:30 pm

5. According to Google AdPlanner.
   http://www.google.com/adplanner BigFlix has
   Page Views: 15 Million and
   Unique Visitors: 830K

   Posted by Ravi Venkatraman | September 6, 2008, 6:37 pm

6. Web Monkey - this was based on an interview; they’re claiming what they’re claiming, and we’ve questioned that. Frankly, I don’t think it is impossible for BIG Flix to get 50 million PVs if they spend a substantial amount on SEM. As Ravi mentioned, AdPlanner pegs the number at 15M. We contacted BIG for a clarification on whether they meant 50 or 15, but they haven’t reverted. Third party stats aren’t accurate, so there’s no basis for comparison.

   About equity analysis - I’m not venturing into that because that’s not our focus - and not because I can’t do it. If you’re judging this site on the basis of equity analysis, then thats your call.

   Posted by Nikhil Pahwa | September 8, 2008, 1:08 pm

7. Quote: “BIGFlix has 100 odd TV serials, and Astitva is getting a lot of views;…”
   Well, well, well… Astitva is not even there on BigFlicks!

   Posted by Hrimmie | September 8, 2008, 3:24 pm

8. Hrimmie: my fault. I had Rajshri.com and BIGFlix open while I was talking to Gianchandani, and was comparing the two. By mistake, I asked him about Astitva doing well, and he said TV serials are getting views primarily from the International market. Have corrected. Thanks for pointing it out.

   Posted by Nikhil Pahwa | September 8, 2008, 4:15 pm

9. [...] September, Gianchandani had told MediaNama that they’re targeting online ad sales revenues of Rs. 10 crores by March 2009. Rental [...]

   Posted by BigFlix Claims 80,000 Users; Break Even By Q3 Of FY10 | MediaNama | December 2, 2008, 4:40 pm