fter dominating the digital distribution in Tamil Nadu by installing Qube projectors in 700 screens, Real Image Media Technologies is getting ready to take a huge bite off the growing ‘ticketing’ business in India following the acquisition of a prominent Hyderabad-based ticketing website, ticketdada.com.
“The website has been re-branded as justtickets.in. We took over a company already doing well in combined Andhra – 380 theatres in their network and 8 lakh registered users. We are in the process of adding more theatres in Tamil Nadu after which we will go live in September,” said Arvind Ranganathan, CEO, Real Image Media Technologies.
Asked why the company has decided to get into the ticketing business, Mr. Arvind said that big movie chains were becoming nervous about depending too much on ticketing companies for their revenue.“With the growing online e-commerce market, we are also doing the right thing. The theatres also don’t want to depend on a single website from which they get most of their revenue. Therefore, there is a need for more players in the business. A lot of theatres from tier 2 and 3 cities have evinced interest to be a part of this network. We want to quickly take up the strong number 2 position,” he said.
The company has been very aggressively marketing its rating website, moviebuff.com, with an eye on collecting as much data which can be used by industry.
“We set out to collect usable data back in 2010 because we wanted to fill this void. In another two years, we will have the entire database with us,” says Senthil Kumar, co-founder, Real Image Media Technologies. The film industry surprisingly, he says, has not had a problem with it. “No major objections have been raised by actors, producers or filmmakers for this rating website,” he says.
With the Tamil Film Producers’ Council raising concerns over Real Image’s total domination of digital distribution, this new venture could well be seen as an effort to control to control both the screen and the seats of a theatre. We don’t intend to be a monopoly. This is simply an effort to diversify into new digital businesses. Data analytics will be the big game in the near future,” says Senthil Kumar.
