The evolution of Digital Distribution and Exhibition took a significant step forward today as Reliance MediaWorks Ltd., India’s fastest growing film and entertainment services company and a member of the Reliance ADA group announced a strategic business alliance with UFO Moviez, the world’s largest digital satellite cinema network to establish the largest gateway for digital film releases on the silver screen in India.
By combining UFO Moviez’s world-class digitization technology with Reliance MediaWorks’ high-end digital cinema experience and extensive theatrical programming expertise, the alliance will help create a strong platform that would enable the producers and distributors to start utilizing more number of digital screens to ensure a wider release, consistency in quality and curb piracy. Also, it would simultaneously ensure that the exhibitors can enhance their theatrical revenues as they can have hassle-free, timely release and greater availability of movies without issues of print quality or delivery dates.
Under this alliance, UFO Moviez would set up an additional encoding and encryption facility at Reliance MediaWorks’ premises and business engagements with the producers and distributors for this facility would be undertaken by Reliance MediaWorks. The company is looking at undertaking around 15 movie digitization projects on a weekly basis. The primary benefit of this will be to ensure a more controlled environment for conversion of movies to the digital platform in a standardized manner for uniform quality and security.
Reliance MediaWorks also operates BIG Cinemas, India's largest cinema chain with over 250 screens in India spread across 78 cities in the country. This significant theatrical reach, operational learning and rich programming experience across territories will enable the company to provide movie programming services for 1,800 cinemas in India equipped with UFO's advanced digital technology. Under this arrangement, UFO would recommend Reliance MediaWorks’ offer for programming services to these cinemas across India.
With the right mix of programming, including digital programming, a movie can be released simultaneously in several more screens, leading to over 20% increase in box office revenues, which benefits the producers, distributors and exhibitors.
Considering the quality, security and reliability of UFO technology coupled with convenience of satellite delivery, Reliance MediaWorks also plans to increase the number of digital screens across its cinemas in India using UFO technology.
The availability of wide digital deployment also makes available a number of alternate content options to cater customers with a wider choice, while breaking down costs to a per-show basis. The success of alternative content programming can be witnessed through the live streaming of DLF IPL 2010 that was screened by UFO Moviez across 700 screens this year.
"Reliance MediaWorks and UFO Moviez have each led fundamental transformations in their own market, significantly impacting the Indian Film Industry," said Anil Arjun, CEO of Reliance MediaWorks. "By combining our unique strengths, Reliance MediaWorks and UFO Moviez will accelerate the creation of a secure digital ecosystem that facilitates a wider reach for digital distribution of movies, delivering to movie consumers a superior experience, more content, with greater reliability and lower costs. That’s where we can make a real difference."
Commenting on the development, Kapil Agarwal, Joint MD of UFO Moviez India Ltd. said "We are very excited about this strategic business alliance with Reliance MediaWorks. The alliance would help us focus on our core business of technology development and greater proliferation of digital systems across cinemas, while creating a significant platform for producers and distributors to optimize their print costs and spend more on marketing and publicity within the overall release cost, resulting into accelerating of the recovery process."
Reliance MediaWorks is the first motion picture services facility in India and all of Asia to be accredited by the UK’s industry body FACT (Federation Against Copyright Theft). The certification is a major recognition of the efforts by Reliance MediaWorks to protect and safeguard the films against piracy.
Reliance MediaWorks has established a dominant and comprehensive presence across the entire Film and Media Services value chain which includes services like Motion Picture Processing and DI; Visual Effects; Film Restoration and Image Enhancement; 2D to 3D Conversion; Digital Mastering; Studios and Equipment rentals, with presence across US, UK, Japan and India.
UFO Moviez is the largest chain of satellite based digital cinemas in the world with more than 1800 screens across India. UFO Moviez beams digitally mastered high quality movie images through satellite directly to cinema halls facilitating wide release of any film without any additional cost in prints for content owners and unprecedented viewing pleasure to movie viewers alike and has till date screened more than 3.8 Million shows all over India.
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