 "Railways to take offline route to stream movies")
Soon, trains and railway stations in India may become infotainment hubs. The Indian Railways is set to provide offline content on demand - such as television serials, movies, short videos, kids' shows and sports, songs and devotional content - apart from providing a rail radio service to its passengers.
The railways has had a few round of talks with some players in the offline streaming market. The targeted infotainment verticals for the railways include radio, video, digital music and digital gaming.
According to sources, talks have already happened with Moving Talkies, Speed Fetch and MyFreeTV. MyFreeTV has had a trial run on Gatimaan Express, Moving Talkies has been offering services in select Rajdhani and Shatabdi trains. Speed Fetch has been offering services on Taj Express on an experimental basis. A pilot project on the Delhi-Trivandrum Rajdhani had an adoption rate of more than 50 per cent.
The Boston Consulting Group had said in a recent report that through content on demand (COD) on trains and on stations, the railways could see an infotainment market potential of around Rs 2,277 crore in three years. Out of this, radio would being in around Rs 706 crore. The railways can boast of a daily captive audience base of 23 million, which may translate into 7 million viewing hours a day, to the companies in the fray for the infotainment business with the railways.
For radio and free content on demand, monetisation would solely be through advertisements. For premium content on demand, consumers will have to pay a minimal amount.
BCG said it expected radio advertisements to be priced at 17 paise per user. For content on demand, it would be around Rs 4.7 a user. For providing offline content, the expense per coach will come work out to Rs 38,000. The cost to set up infrastructure for content streamed through internet would come to around Rs 25 lakh a coach. The plan is to rollout COD and rail radio on 30 per cent of the trains in the first year, 60 per cent in the second year and on all trains by the third year. The technology would be implemented in A1 stations in the first year and in the remaining stations in the second and third years.
For radio, three models are under consideration - a dedicated rail radio channel live through the internet, a broadcast local radio signal and pre-recorded content with some updates.
The BCG report said interested parties might include content owners such as Eros Entertainment, Balaji Productions and Shemaroo Entertainment and content aggregators such as Radio Mirchi, Fever FM, Hungama and Bindass. Major players in the offline streaming market who might be interested on talking this route would include Pressplay TV, Moving Talkies, Dwingloo, Fropcorn, Touring Talkies, Myfreetv.in, Zonk and Cloudplay. According to BCG, apart from this, internet service providers and telecom players might be interested in the market.
