More than four years ago, Pankaj Sikka, an LA-based IT entrepreneur started the popular movie blogging site PassionforCinema.com. That was when blogging was still unknown in the Indian movie industry. Now he has founded Dingora, a completely free online self-service theatre for producers, distributors and rights-holders of movies where they can release their movies on the web in DRM protected streaming, simultaneously on the same Friday as its theatrical release.
It is based on a simple pay-per-view type of model, with the rights-holder receiving a direct percentage share of 60% of the movie's revenue. The rights-holders have complete control of streaming the movie to the territories/regions they want to show or block, so as to not overlap the regions where the movie has a theatrical release. Regions can be a country, state, city or even a longitude/latitude. One can block a region and even block a radius around the region.
Some of the important tools for the rights-holder to use include deciding their own ticket price (price per view) and changing it as often as they want, offering discount prices and customizing the run dates that can range from a day to a few days, weeks or months. The rights holder has complete flexibility to run or withdraw and re-run their movies as and when they would like to.
The rights-holders can run multiple movies in parallel and each movie can have its own distribution and commercial design. One can also run multiple movies from your account at the same time and each movie can have its own individual distribution design (blocked regions, price, run period etc.)
Pankaj Sikka answers a few of our queries:
How did you get interested in something like Dingora?