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Annually, India produces more than 2,000 films and the movie rights market is incredibly disorganised. Despite the tremendous number of films on the market, there aren’t as many people looking to purchase them. India’s first NFT movie marketplace, Producer Bazaar, intends to bridge this gap, along with raising industry knowledge and provide a safe space to purchase and sell content.
“Currently, there is no central agency that keeps track of movie rights. Outdated paper contracts are the norm and creators are not well-versed with the legal fine print, remain ill-informed about their rights and are unaware of how the system works. Our platform aims to change the cinema industry from an unorganised to an organised sector and increase the level of transparency. We feel creators deserve to have a regular income and to have control over the rights they want to licence for a specific time period,” G.K Tirunavukarasu, Director and Co-Founder, ProducerBazaar.com, told us.
The idea of Producer Bazaar originated during the pandemic, when Tirunavukarasu and Senthilnayagam met during the challenging months of COVID-19 and decided to combine their skills to develop a novel business model which would leverage blockchain technology and streamline the rather unstructured and outdated methodologies of the Indian film industry. They created ProducerBazaar.com, as India’s first marketplace of its kind for media and entertainment intellectual property rights for movies, web series, and television programming in multiple languages. Their objective is to establish a sustainable creative economy leveraging blockchain technology, facilitate seamless movie trade and address the real-world challenges faced by Indian film creators in monetising, protecting and maximising their intellectual property rights.
The company had received seed funding from the Indian government after being recognised by Startup India in March last year.
But how will they achieve the seemingly difficult target of increasing transparency in buying and selling movie rights business?
“The process is very clearly structured and we have a SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for the producers. Once the content has been copyrighted, and legally verified, it is transparently and credibly listed on our platform. Credibility is crucial for the buyer and once they are satisfied with the fine print, we discuss their needs and connect them with the content they desire. The entire contract will then be converted using NFTs, to make tracking simple. We will also unbundle all IPRs including theatrical, audio, and digital rights and simplify the access to them,” Tirunavukarasu explains.
Another objective that they want to achieve simultaneously is to expand the market for regional language movies to the sub-continent audiences and Indian movies to non-Indians across the globe. They plan to expand the market for regional cinema across the globe through dubbing, subtitling and adequate promotions. They are also in discussions with producers from Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh.
The author can be reached at bkabir@entrepreneurindia.com and Instagram.com/kabirsinghbhandari
