Bidding you adieu dear piracy!

The monster of piracy seemed to be invincible, humble plea by cine artists, putting more prints of new movies trying their luck at box office and so called stringent laws trying to rein in the monster couldn’t bear any fruit. Like those fairy tale stories where the life of the invincible monster lay somewhere else here too this monster prospered as no one was able to hit it where it hurts the most, the price. Yeah Indians may be moral but they are price sensitive as well, so they won’t mind dabbling into much scorned world of pirated CDs and DVDs, economic reasons score more than any latent morality that we may be nurturing yet..

Enter Moser Baer, last week an announcement from their stable has meant that days of our seemingly invincible and immortal monster are numbered. Eventually Moser Baer has decided to dabble in much sought after domestic entertainment market and death bells have started to ring for the mean giant of piracy.

Domestic home entertainment market (VCDs and DVDs ) is estimated at Rs 500 crore.
There are 26 million VCD/DVD players in India, but most of them are owned by extremely price sensitive middle class Indians. Remember your economics classes; price elasticity is more for these Indians. The domestic entertainment market is growing at about 25 percent annually. But as expected the chunk of profit is guzzled by undeserving messiahs of piracy and the one , the creator of the art have to be satisfied with what ever pittance they can lay their hands on.

As mentioned again and again the biggest hindrance to growth has been the consumers and the price sensitivity displayed by them. Yeah everything comes with a price tag and it goes like
VCD- sold in market for anything between Rs 35 – Rs 200.come to the shady place and you get it for Rs 15-50. Which one you take home??
DVD—Market asks you to shell out Rs 400 before you pocket one home, want a Naqli one well let your wallet part with a turquoise 100 note. Your take on that??

So when they talk of you are killing someone’s baby by nurturing piracy falls on deaf years. Moser Baer turns it all in their favor. How? By selling VCDs for Rs 28 and DVDs for Rs 34. So where lies the price advantage now ??

They (Moser Baer) are Investing 500 crore in this business over next few years
They are planning to acquire rights to over 7000 movies.. Surely a large number of them will be from catalogue (not the recent ones but older movies). So what?? There is still a sizeable demand for such movies by consumers.

How on earth Moser Baer would be able to roll out CDs and DVDs at throwaway price. At their own expense?? Are they doing any charity? Nah. It’s all feasible because of propriety technology. Physical infrastructure to copy content on large scale is already in place , so once they have their hands on a legally acquired CD, they would happily make enough copies to get prices cut down to ridiculously low levels , making you and me happy and ah helping some one with the slow death it very much needed.

How about distribution, always a disturbing proposition. You may be scoring high on production scales but how would you ensure benefits are reaped by you dear customers. Well Moser Baer already reaches audio .and video software store which sells its blank CDs/DVDs, so distribution won’t be a problem for our hero on a mission.
For film makers too it makes sense to sell rights to Moser Baer as market will expand rapidly. And this is not all however hunky dory it may appear to be. It also plans to set up 300 stores nationwide...Now that’s sure an unbeatable plan to script the denouement for the villain whose life was caged in a needle only our hero could break.