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Starting with one cinema hall, they were Priya. Moving on to launch a joint venture with Village Roadshow, they became Priya Village Roadshow. When Village Roadshow pulled out of India (as they did in many countries so that they could focus on film production rather than on film exhibition) the name shrunk to the now familiar three-letter acronym: PVR.
With the plans that they have on the drawing board and in various stages of execution, the chances are, wherever in India you live, you'll pick a PVR to watch your flick. Because millions of viewers keep going back for the PVR experience. An experience that has been designed to get the viewer happy and satisfied, giving the viewer what he wants - and more. How big will PVR be? As big as their vision? "PVR in every town in India", says Sanjeev Bijli, Director, PVR. "We've got a lot of cities to cover; we really want to be a pan-national, pan Indian brand, and maybe more. We're actually also looking at some international opportunities."
PVR sees a need gap that they want to plug and dominate. To understand how big the potential is, hear it from Tushar Dhingra (VP-Marketing & Communication, PVR Cinemas) as he rattles off numbers that he's obviously living every day: "India had 3.1 billion admissions last year, across all theatres, with the average ticket price at Rs 15. The corresponding figures for the US are 1.5 billion admissions at an average of $5. Do you see the disparity? We have 1.4 billion people; our 15-34 population is growing at double digit rates and it will continue to grow till 2050. That, traditionally, is the international target audience for the movie industry. In India, we have 12 screens per million population; it's 20 screens per million in the US and 77 per million in Europe." He adds, "Look at the way cinema in India is consumed. Around 80 per cent of music content sold in this country is film music; look at our magazines, TV, radio — movies are all pervasive. The consumption is happening, whether through video piracy or DVD parlours. There's a huge gap in the retail sector to provide the number of screens to go out and watch on. So this market is poised for a very high growth. A print run of 3,000 in the US is a common thing; 700 to 1,000 is what you would do in India."
"Around 30 per cent of revenue of the 50 biggest hits of Bollywood is coming from the 150-160 odd multiplexes. This figure alone will give one an idea of the opportunity that we aim to tap. It is apparent that the shortage of screens aids piracy — consumers have no choice in large parts of India. Imagine how much the industry will grow when we have everything in place and the leakages in piracy are controlled as much as possible. The opportunity is there, the consumers are there. We are sitting at the threshold of a big boom," Dhingra adds.
The opportunity is not limited to the metros; the mini-metros and large towns are in PVR's sights. The qualifiers: the town has to have a high population density (not very difficult in India, surely), and as Dhingra puts it, "a healthy day time population". So while the future looks rosy, Dhingra is wary of the problems that too many multiplexes could cause, warning signs that PVR takes into account while evaluating a new market. "We have to just avoid clustering, avoid the blood-baths like entrepreneurs have seen in Ahmedabad. Gurgaon, for example, does not have an adequately healthy day-time population to support the screens that are there today. Clustering is bad. Markets need to be mapped properly," he says.
Perhaps the solution as far as clustering lies in the Australian experience that Dhingra quotes, where all the multiplex owners got together and decided on fair competition, which wouldn't threaten individual players and avoided untenable explosion of multiplexes in any particular market. Multiplex owners in India are now in the process of forming a similar body.
What makes the PVR experience so unique, that results in almost assured success for each new multiplex — and even causes business in other outlets of a PVR premise to shoot up? Jai Subramaniam of Landmark Bookstore (recently bought over by Tata's Westside) is forthright about the "PVR" contribution. At their Bangalore outlet in The Forum, sales, according to Subramaniam, shot up by an astonishing 25 per cent after PVR opened.
The success formula is: a formula. To PVR, the movie experience is much more than the movie, and includes the interiors, the ambience, dining, snacks, communication and engagement. When a moviegoer buys a ticket, that is only the first time PVR gets money out of his wallet. After that, there are a myriad temptations in store as PVR attempts to maximise the monetisation of their footfalls.
Sanjeev Bijli, Director, PVR Cinemas, says that they learnt a lot from the makeover of the original Priya, "It's still not a multiplex, it's a single screen. What it taught us was that there's this huge appetite to watch films and that there's this acceptability towards price, too. It wasn't that it was just a cheap entertainment option; the price could go up to whatever we're charging now. But apart from this, you had to provide the consumer with a very clean, safe and hygienic environment. So that was a lesson: it was the complete genesis that there was a business here; there is an avenue open for entertainment, but it has to be very safe, hygienic, clean, air conditioned. Otherwise it would never work; in the old days it never did. If you do provide this, people do come back to the cinemas and they'll pay a certain premium for it. This is what we learnt and that gave us the push to make more, in different formats."
To read the entire article, buy a copy of Impact Advertising and Marketing magazine dated September 19-25