Browse here for box-office trends

IF YOU think cinema is staple diet here, then here's a wholesale supermarket. What's more, at your fingertips, quite literally, and in your own drawing room or office, thanks to the World Wide Web, that might soon spell cobwebs for automobile showrooms. For you can work from home. `Coming Soon.'

So before the house gets full, get yourself a ticket at www.indiamoviebiz.com if films are your bread, butter and popcorn. Here's a portal that's opening up `windows' for online trading-India's ``first Business-to-Business (B2B) portal for the Rs. 8,000-crore Indian film industry.''

The site promoted by Mr. Sreedhar Pillai, former journalist, is ``a new price discovery paradigm which will evolve into a stable business practice.''

``The mechanism enables novel methods of doing traditional business wherein producers can directly approach a theatre owner for a movie exhibition, bringing dubbed foreign films directly to smaller centres and exporting Indian movies,'' Mr. Pillai explains.

The functions are many. It facilitates trading in a multitude of movie rights, talent searches and creates a market for new cinema hall concessions such as media selling and vending machines. All this for users only.

A ticket to the indiamoviebiz.com costs Rs. 5,000 - the sign-up amount for registration. The site already had 52 users, including movie- theatres, producers, distributors and cine-rights holders, on the day of the launch.

To start off, the site targets the four Southern States that account for ``nearly 60 per cent of all movie theatres in India.'' The South comprises of 7,500 cinemas, the site estimates.

``While the core industry perceives no threat to its existence, it nevertheless must evolve a new paradigm to integrate with the merging economy,'' says Mr. Vijaykumar Puducheri of Blueshift India, Blueshift India, that has a 16 per cent stake in the venture, has provided the site with technical, strategic and managerial inputs.

So what does it offer the common man? Nothing, for now it is a paid site. But there's something coming soon. The common man can access the site for checking out the new movie releases, studying box-office trends, trade news and also browse the member homepages created by the site for its registered users.

``It will be a while for us to move from B2B to B2C (Business to Consumer). We do have plans,'' Mr. Pillai says.

By Sudhish Kamath

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Section  : Entertainment