Deja vu (Moserbaer, T-Series ??)

This seems like deja vu. A decade back T-Series came in to audio cassette industry and claimed we will bring down audio cassette prices.

Which they did. Many of the cassettes on T-Series were coming for Rs. 15-20. But all those low price titles were T-Series produced audio sung either by anuradha paudwal or some other T-Series singer or these were T-Series produced B-grade movies. Popular audio still remained around Rs. 35-40 (even on T-series) and the price has infact been increasing. One needs to just go and check out the prices in Music world or Planet M or indiatime.com. Even today T-Series sells DVDs for Rs. 99, which are mostly religious. on the hand they sell “Sarkar” for Rs. 499.

Hence MoserBaer may bring down prices of a few NOT IN DEMAND titles and may be some IN DEMAND titles, just to get the attention. But it will be very difficult to do much more than that.

Few points that come to mind:

– Bollywood movies budgets are growing big by the day, say 40, 60 or even 100 crores.
– Home Video rights of new releases like Dhoom 2, Krishh or even Janemaan etc wont come so cheap to justify the MRPs of 38 or so.
– Most of the old hindi Catalog is with players like Shemaroo, Ultra and T-Series. Moser Baer in unlikely to able to buy them in budget of 500 Crores. Hence old catalog prices wont fall to Rs. 38
– Hollywood titles pricing will also remain as it is (may come down a little bit) , studio’s will continue to control that.
– From what i hear, Moserbaer is in talks to buy some of the smaller players like TIME, BOMBINO etc whose library has hardly 50 (old) tiltes each. Just offering these titles at low prices wont cut it anyways.

All said, I still think MoserBaer’s entry will have a significant impact on the home video industry, but not the one as predicted by press and many others. We are starting discussions for working together with them.

Thoughs? Comments?

Other links :

http://www.contentsutra.com/contentsutra/entry/the-effect-of-moser-baers-dvd-pricing-on-various-stakeholders/

http://www.moserbaer.com/newsroom_pressreleases.asp