Now, buy prepaid cards of movie tickets

Watching a movie will not be a 'lengthy' and tiring experience anymore. Come March 2007, Hyderabad-based Kedia Group, which is into information technology, textiles, edible oils, education and entertainment, will roll out its e-DigiMovie prepaid cards across all the cinemas in the twin cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad.

Developed in-house by Kedia Technologies Limited, the IT subsidiary of the 132-year-old group, the e-DigiMovie prepaid cards will come in denominations of Rs 500, Rs 1,000, Rs 3,000 and Rs 5,000 with a validity of three years.

All a movie buff has to do is purchase the card and send an SMS to the central network system of the company. The network system then sends details of the number of seats available at the particular theatre to the customer via an SMS.

Later, the customer can leisurely walk down to his nearest cinema ghar or bank, swipe his card through the 'SMS Counter Kiosk', choose the row and seats, and get tickets instantly.

The SMS counter kiosks installed at the theatres will comprise an industrial PC, an 8.4-inch LCD display with touch screen and surface sound wave technology, 16 keys, a card reader and writer and a printing speed of thermal paper 90mm per second, among others.

"We are teaming up with the Andhra Pradesh Film Chambers of Commerce for deploying this unique concept in theatres. We recently held discussions with them and are awaiting their approval. Once we are through with this, we will be launching it across all the 180 theatres in the twin cities by March 2007," says Ashok Kumar Kedia, chief executive officer of Kedia Group.

Initially, the group plans to install three kiosks at each theatre and its partner bank's branches and later scale it up to 10 by April. "After assessing the response from Hyderabad, we plan to take the concept to other parts of the state by September this year at an investment of close to Rs 47 crore," he adds.

According to him, the first phase of the roll out entails an investment of around Rs 18 crore.

"We are in talks with a Mumbai-based venture capital firm to fund our initiative, which are expected to reach fruition by this January 25. While 70 per cent of the fund will be raised through the VC, the rest will be generated through internal accruals," says Kedia.

The Kedia Group expects to clock a turnover of Rs 235 crore this financial year. Its revenue outlook for the 2007-08 fiscal is around Rs 250 crore.

"Once all our kiosks are fully in place by March, we expect our e-DigiMovie cards business to contribute about 25 per cent to our total turnover next year," he adds.