BookMyShow starts online platform for live events

MUMBAI: As the once burgeoning live events industry has come down to a shuddering halt due to Covid-19 outbreak, BookMyShow (BMS), India’s leading out-of-home entertainment and ticketing company, has developed its own video streaming platform exclusively for live events.Named BookMyShow Online, the platform will offer paid and free performances across music, comedy, and other performing arts to its users not just in India, but also across USA, North America, UK, Germany, UAE, South East Asia, and West Indies.“We were agile enough to change tack by introducing virtual in-home entertainment offerings in India and other global markets,” said Parikshit Dar, co-founder & director, BookMyShow.The platform was born out of the need to make virtual live entertainment, a friction-less and hassle-free viewing experience, he added. “Our entire business was sort of revolving around movies and events. Covid-19 gave us an opportunity to relook at our business from the point of view of not just the out-of-home experience, but also focus on the in-home experience. Some of those plans, which we were just talking about earlier, got fast-tracked.”In its testing phase, BookMyShow Online has hosted over 30 events, including the first-ever global virtual tours of Latin musician Willie Gomez, Australian pop band The Buckleys and American music artist Taylor Castro’s performances amongst others.Later this month, the platform will exclusively host the first ever virtual music festival, the Sunburn Home Festival, with some of the biggest names in the electronic dance music (EDM), with 3D animations and special effects, showcasing the virtual live experience of a music concert with end-to-end production of stage, lights, LED, lasers, special effects and more.The company has extensively tested the product for concurrent users and events and has been adding almost 100-150 events daily. During the first four weeks, customer engagement was close to four million people.Dar said that while most of the events were free earlier, now about 65% of virtual events on BMS are behind a paywall.“We can smoothly host up to 50,000 concurrent users per minute and currently testing the platform for 1 lakh users. We are also planning to launch it as an app shortly and will continue to offer this even after the pandemic is over and the events are allowed,” said Dar.BookMyShow Online will have events across different genres like Comedy, Music, Educational Masterclasses for upskilling, international music concerts featuring global artists, including those in partnership with Live Nation.The company plans to roll out a subscription model over the next few months. Currently the monetisation is only via pay-per-view format. For security and curbing piracy, all the content will be watermarked and there will be download restrictions in place.BMS has partnered with global video solution platform Brightcove to power the use case for BookMyShow Online.

from Economic Times https://ift.tt/3eOilLJ