First Day, First Stream: Is this the end of the road for Cinema halls? The answer is an emphatic NO

As expected, the Indian Twitterverse, including several bright lights of the Hindi movie industry, immediately applauded this move. A raging pandemic aside, there are several reasons for cinema audiences to get excited over digital premieres of movies.

• Captive Audience Seeks Fresh, Family Friendly Content: In the recently conducted Qualitative Syndicated Research Study by Inxise Datalabs/ Pixights Consulting on the changes Indian consumers have made to their consumption habits in the post-Covid-19 world, we learnt that the lack of fresh content on Hindi and Regional GE channels led to consumers trying and subscribing to more than one OTT platform.

There is a clear need for distraction and mood alleviation from content, both solus-viewing and family-viewing friendly, during this quarantine period, which has led families to turn to OTT platforms.

The new OTT consumers are, especially, seeking family-friendly series and movies that can be watched together by the whole family. In our recent Qualitative Syndicated Study, men across centres said that this is something they did for web series to gauge if it can be watched with their families, namely, wife, kids or even their parents Unlike original OTT content, Hindi movies with well established stars are perceived to be more family friendly content.

• Safe and Sasta: Ever since I can remember, middle and upper-middle class viewers in the Metros and Class 1 towns have complained about how expensive the theatre going experience was. The rising price of movie tickets aside, the complains were always more against the astronomical rise in the prices of basic concession stand snacks such as popcorn and cola/ soda. For a family of four, a movie outing can mean spending upwards of Rs. 1,500 i.e. more than the annual subscription cost of Amazon Prime.

• The Option to Pick Convenient Time, Pause And Re-watch: Movies on OTT platforms can be watched at the convenience of the audience, paused in case one needs to break and re-watched multiple times- a huge advantage over watching the movie in a hall.

So, it came as no surprise that over the past six days, Netflix India and Disney+ Hotstar have also announced digital premieres of some other interesting movies the Captain Vikram Batra biopic- Shershaah and the Akshay Kumar horror-comedy Laxmmi Bomb respectively.

Now, while the news of digital movie premieres was hailed by viewers and the film industry as the perfect move during these uncertain times, distribution partners such as INOX and PVR were not-so-pleased.