Virtual bites: Digital piracy robs Bollywood

On a trip to Helsinki in Finland, Rajjat Barjatya stumbled upon 15,000 Indian families who had regular access to Bollywood movies even when no production house was distributing them there.

"The families were paying monthly rent to a website that delivered the latest pirated Bollywood content," says Barjatya, who figured that the Indian entertainment sector was being plagiarised and producers who were spending millions on marketing and publicity were being robbed, virtually.

"There was a huge gap in demand and supply of Bollywood content to NRIs settled all over the globe," adds Barjatya, the managing director of Rajshri Media, the digital arm of Rajshri Productions.

Today, Barjatya is doing a roaring business among the NRI population settled in the US, UK and Canada. Success speaks for Barjatya. Rajshri's blockbuster film Hum Aapke Hain Kaun has been viewed over 500,000 times till date and can be downloaded for $4.99.

The website hosts over 6,000 hours of premium video content, all of which has been licensed from India's leading content owners and can be streamed free, ad-supported and downloaded at a nominal price between $4.99 and $9.99.

Barjatya has also unveiled 90 webisodes and mobisodes, of three minutes each, that will be available for free online streaming and as mobile downloads for Idea subscribers.

Piracy of intellectual property is not new to the media and entertainment sector. However, the scale of the problem is definitely new-fangled. A recent study estimates that the Indian entertainment industry loses $4 billion and more than 800,000 jobs each year because of piracy.

Not ready to give up on digital distribution just yet, entertainment majors such as Rajshri Media, UTV, YashRaj Studios, and Shemaroo Entertainment, among many others, are slowly building their digital roadmaps to tap the 5 million broadband-connected homes in India.

"First with music, and now with movies, as broadband capabilities expand, hundreds of thousands of copies race across the Internet daily, clearly harming producers and legitimate retailers," laments Siddharth Roy Kapur, CEO, UTV Motion Pictures.

In the US, the largest market for both Bollywood and non-Bollywood content, there are about 200,000 Indian millionaires, with some 15 per cent of Silicon Valley start-ups believed to be owned by Indians, according to a report by JPMorgan. UTV, informs Kapur, will look to target the overseas customers first with its digital offering.

Filmed entertainment executives have only to look at the music industry to see the dangers of insufficient action