Art & Entertainment

'The First Of Its Kind Internet Theatre'

' You wanna watch a new Friday release or an unreleased movie? Go to Dingora. For everything else there's the video library'

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'The First Of Its Kind Internet Theatre'
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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?

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During the course of running PFC, I found that one major gripe of the Indian movie watching fan was that 90% of the movies would never reach the NRI settled in the USA or UK or Australia. For NRIs in the Africa or South America there was and still is no single legal distribution channel! Eventually the initial idea led to me putting the design to paper, improvising on it further and then spending about two years looking for investors to kick-start the first of its kind Internet Theatre.

Why is Dingora important for small cinema? 

Typically in the movie industry, as a thumb rule, the marketing and print costs of a movie are directly proportional to budget of the movie. Hence it is not common for a small movie to release widely and be aggressively marketed. This is where Dingora comes in. With Dingora, small movies can focus on using the internet to reach out to the widest possible audience on the very weekend of its release in the theatres for absolutely zero cost. 

How will it change the game?

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On many levels. First it is going to become absolutely easy and effortless for every filmmaker to reach out to the 30 million NRIs and millions of Indians in India where their movie is not destined to release, instantly on the same Friday of its theatrical release. This helps the filmmaker and the producer to maximize their gross on the very first weekend, when in the system, where a movie's hit or flop status is declared by the following Monday.

Using Dingora, now the filmmakers can beat piracy at its own game. When movies are pirated online by the following week via some badly video camera print of the screen, filmmakers will be reaching out with their movies in pristine HD right to their audience’ home.

What kind of films will you play on it?

All films that need to be released in a theatre, are releasing on Friday or never got a release at all.

How much are you buying the rights for?

The business model is based on direct revenue share. The rights holders of the movies get a higher percentage of the revenue.

And how much will the viewer be paying for a screening?

The prices are set by the filmmakers themselves. They decide the price and are free to change it as often as they want. They can even offer discount prices in parallel!

What are the films in your kitty and what ones do we look forward to?

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Dingora is modelled on a typical theatre, so we go week to week to release movies both forthcoming and ones that never got a release or had a limited release. Dingora is a theatre - online, rather than a video library. We are signing deals with major buyers and studios to independent producers for same Friday releases in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and other language movies. All I can say now, without revealing much is that, it is going to get very very exciting a time for filmmakers and film fans!

How does it differ from youtube etc?

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No one offers such a customized do it yourself package. Everyone else is confused between being a theatre and a video library. The result? Not many films released there on commercial terms have surged ahead. Releasing Indian films on such sites is like a small corner store in a huge shopping mall - they are never noticed. Dingora is that store itself. You wanna watch a new Friday release or an unreleased movie? Go to Dingora. For everything else there's the video library.

This is a web only interview that does not appear in print

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