MUMBAI: Seventymm, a movie DVD/VCD rental company, is planning to invest $15 million (around Rs 637 million) over the next five years as it targets a nationwide presence in the home video segment.
The company has so far raised approximately $10 million from venture capital firms which it will use in movie acquisitions and brand building.
“We have raised around $10 million through separate rounds of venture capital funding led by Matrix Partners India, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and ePlanet Ventures. We will be using this capital for movie acquisitions (a rental license arrangement for one, two or three years) and brand building. The fourth quarter of this year will see an investment of Rs 80-100 million in mass media campaigns, which include both online and offline marketing,” says Seventymm chief operating officer Subhanker Sarker.
Seventymm has roped in Rediffusion DYR Kolkata who will be help in building the brand. “We aim to acquire customers through various forms of advertising that include out-of-home, mobile, online and also cinema advertising,” Sarker adds.
The company at present has 18,000 titles across a range of genres covering English, Hindi, Marathi, Gujrati, Tamil, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu, Bhojpuri, Oriya, Punjabi and Rajasthani.
“We have tied up with Palador for all their film titles. Also, since 60 per cent of cinema content movement in India is Bollywood, our concentration will definitely be more on this genre,” says Sarker.
The company, which currently operates in Mumbai, New Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad and Chandigarh, aims to touch a 4 million subscriber base in five years.
“Currently we have built a subscriber base of 70,000 members and we aim to amplify this number to 4 million in the next 5 years. By the fourth quarter of this fiscal, we will be expanding to Kolkata, Pune and Ahmedabad. We aim to be in 40 cities by the end of 2009,” elaborates Sarker.
Unlike its competitors, the company does not have any plans of setting up offline stores and believes that its home delivery and online store model will “definitely” fetch more customers for itself.
“People use online stores because they know that they can get the movie they want delivered at their doorstep. So, anyways they will not visit the store if they can avail the ‘drop at door’ delivery model sitting at home,” Sarker says.
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