You chose the Tamil Nadu and Kerala markets to enter the VCD/DVD market first. Why?
Today, we have VCDs and DVDs from 11 Indian languages. Yes, we started collecting Tamil and Malayalam titles in 2006 because we found that movie watching is the highest in Tamil and Malayalam. The number of people who watch films and TV is the highest in these two states.
Then comes Andhra Pradesh. Keralites are not star crazy, but film crazy.
How many titles have you acquired?
In Tamil, we have 1,500 titles, out of the 5,000 films made so far. Sun TV has around 2,000 titles. In Kerala, we bought some 700 films, out of 2,500 films released so far.
What is the strategy behind buying old titles?
We felt these films are not exploited well by the market. The label owners were doing premium marketing and not mass marketing. There is a difference between premium and mass marketing. Premium is you price it at Rs 150 or Rs 200 and sell low volume. How many can afford to buy at Rs 150? Because it is priced high, it is also not distributed aggressively.
Image: Tourists shift through a wide assortment of pirated music CDs and DVDs showing mostly Hollywood releases at a stall in Sanur, on the Indonesian resort island of Bali. | Photograph: Richard A. Brooks/AFP/Getty Images
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