Settlement & exchange platform for movie industry in India

Our customer is a platform provider for commerce and settlement in the movie industry value chain. The product streamlines the commerce through unification and alignment of all stakeholders and by facilitating easy to use trading functions

Business Overview & Gaps

The business of movies in India involves immense value flow across various stakeholders in the distribution chain. There is however a lack of a dependable and organized platform for commerce between these stakeholders. Box Office collections ultimately drive the business of movies, but there are some key challenges faced by the principal stakeholders:

• Lack of Governance and Accountability
• Piracy and Revenue Leakages due to unreported and unaccounted sales
• Need for Business Intelligence but lack of statistical and factual data
• Revenue Degradation due to the number of participants in the Value Chain
• Cash handling and flow regularization across the Value Chain

The issues primarily are in the management of the agreements, collections, settlement, and business intelligence. The need was for a platform that guarantees payments and settlements to its subscribers. Our Customer wanted development of a settlement platform that took care of the industry needs.

The need for the platform was further extended and the customer wanted the following activities to be carried out by Dusane Infotech:

• Understanding requirements and converting them to specifications, design and development and deployment
• Work with a T5 consulting company towards validating business workflow and doing risk assessment
• Vendor selection for head end infrastructure, network, communication and onsite installation and support services
• Design the data center as per ISO norms
• IP protection of customer ideas and filing of patents on their behalf

• Exhibitor and distributor agree on a “Pact”. The Distributor then fills a Pact form and attaches a copy of the Pact agreement and faxes it to the exchange.
• The Pact metadata is then entered into the exchange central system. This includes the movie, period of the Pact, revenue terms, taxes and number of shows etc.
• After the Pact is entered in the system, distributor using a login/password can view the list of Pacts assigned against his name. Distributor proof reads the Pact entered and approves it.
• After the Pact is approved by the distributor online, the Pact information automatically gets downloaded on iTicketing, a box office ticketing system. This ticketing System is located at the exhibitors end. The exhibitor at his end reviews the Pact and approves (or rejects) it.
• Once the Pact is approved by the exhibitor show timing, ticket rates and screen are configured in the iTicketing box office system by the exhibitor
• The box office sale of tickets happen
• At completion of each show, the sale data such as screen name, ticket count, class name, ticket cost, and total sale amount gets automatically uploaded on the central system.
• On completion of show and sales upload, the Pact is marked as “closed”.
• The Pact accounting happens in a way that the sales amount automatically gets distributed amongst all Stakeholders (i.e. Exhibitor, Distributor, State Government etc)
• Each stake holder has an online account to which the amount gets credited. The stakeholder can withdraw or remit amount to this account.
• Exhibitor has to keep a minimum balance in their account as the ticket sale happens at the exhibitor end and the physical cash remains at the exhibitor end.

Dusane helped the customer architect, implement and operationalize the exchange platform. Being a first of its kind solution, Dusane had the twin challenges of developing a robust yet flexible solution. It had to be robust because the exchange was a platform to do commerce. It had to be flexible because the business idea was still under evolution and it was expected that there would be a lot of changes based on market feedback.

Dusane’s solution included the following:

• Architecting an enterprise grade solution platform to run the Exchange
• Design and development of exchange central system.
• Development of exhibitor end ticketing system.
• Design integration protocols for integrating the ticket sales information with the central exchange system
• Integrate a leading bank’s front office system for account and deal settlement
• Design and implement the entire head end server and network infrastructure
• Work closely with one of the T5 consulting company to audit the business process and do business risk analysis
• Make the software and hardware infrastructure to be compliant with ISO 9002 standards
• Provide support to the systems and software after the launch
• Participate in technology presentation to leading industry players including production houses, distributors, exhibitors and various state governments

Microsoft .NET, C#, MS SQL Server

This platform is implemented in over 1500 theatres in India. A number of distributors and state governments have agreed to be part of the exchange. There are many more sites that are going live consistently. The exchange offers tangible benefits to all the stake holders, such as

PRODUCER

• Showcase upcoming movies to the distributor’s forum.
• Negotiate territory-wise best price
• View real time sales information and projections

DISTRIBUTORS

• Prevention of revenue leakage
• Automatic settlement with guarantees
• Interact with exhibitors directly and direct theater hire
• Detailed business analysis and intelligence
• Parametric analysis – trend analysis, market analysis, movie analysis

EXHIBITORS

• Free electronic ticketing system including the hardware
• High visibility amongst the content providers
• Automated regulatory compliance
• Value added services like concessions/food court system

GOVERNMENT

• Automatic settlement with guarantees
• Real time tax revenue projection
• Reduction in administration overhead
• Compliance and regulatory reporting in-built
• Support for multi-level taxation
• Reporting in government approved formats
• Bottom line and taxation analysis