Indian movie ticketing platform BookMyShow has announced plans to shift its focus away from the cinema industry, and turns its sights to live events and content.
The movie vertical currently generates around 65 per cent of its revenue, but it wants to bring this down to around a third in the next three to five years through growth elsewhere.
BookMyShow has increased investment in content platforms like Daily Social and Movie Nation, in an effort to transition into creating a content engaged community using social media.
“We invested a lot in new areas like content (in FY17) and are focusing a lot on live (events) now,” BookMyShow chief executive Ashish Hemrajani said in an interview, according to the Economic Times.
“We are taking a new direction in the areas where we have been investing in, trying to change the course of the company.”
The entertainment company has also launched a multi-channel network on Youtube with its two channels, BookMyStyle and BookMyTv, having reached almost 100 million views over the last six months.
The move is supporting BookMyShow’s efforts to expand its reach and target a younger demographic, along with maintaining its existing customers.
Its competitor, Paytm, is currently India’s largest mobile payment platform and sees movie ticketing as the company’s next $1bn gross transaction vertical, along with travel.
The aggressive push from Paytm has had an impact on BookMyShow as it moves to further scale up its live events and content business.
Hemrajani said: “I love it when competition spends, that means that they are not being intelligent about what they are doing. We are sitting at a time when we have seen enough people spend money and what their condition is.”
Last year, BookMyShow was able to boast of a virtual monopoly in the online ticketing space, although experts contend that the market is still growing.
Ajay Shah, partner-media & entertainment and transaction advisory services at EY, told the Economic Times: “While both BookMyShow and Paytm cover multiplexes in most big cities, a lot of smaller cities and smaller multiplexes and single screens are not yet covered. Also, the digitisation push is helping drive ticketing sales online. In view of the aforesaid, there is a huge market that is up for grabs and both can coexist.”
Image: Kotivalo
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