Mumbai: Excel Home Entertainment is the distribution and marketing arm of Excel Productions AudioVisuals Pvt. Ltd. Started with a single home produced title ‘A Camp in Nurseryland’ in 1999, it now markets and distributes over thousand SKUs across the country. The company is the exclusive Home Entertainment licensee for Twentieth Century Fox, MGM, HIT Entertainment, Hearst Entertainment, Merchant Ivory Productions, Chorion, Nickelodeon, Aamir Khan Productions and Shringar Films for the territory of India and Sri Lanka. With the biggest collection of International films on DVD, Excel is one of the largest Home Entertainment Company in India with a market share of over 25% in the International category.
Headquartered in Mumbai, and reaching over 9,000 retail, rental and non -traditional format outlets, it has the most effective Home Video distribution network spanning over 91 cities in India. The total staff strength is 110 with separate management teams handling Distribution and Key Account business.
tvnews4u.com caught up with Mr. Muslim Kapasi, MD, Excel Home Entertainment for an exclusive interview:
Q. Considering the digital market growth, where do you see Home Video Market growth in the next three years?
M. Kapasi -As more and more DVD and Blu-ray Players sell and still sell, the physical home video market already has a much larger base and will continue to grow until 2018.
Q. What do you think are the value adds that will attract more consumers in the home video space?
M. Kapasi -In addition to the various Value Adds (viz. Deleted Scenes, Behind The Scenes, Commentaries, Storyboards, Interactivity, etc.,) it is also the sheer experience of watching a movie in high definition on Blu-ray and 3D Blu-ray discs that is still irreplaceable.
Q. Piracy being part of this space, with growing digital downloads, and free uploads of content, how do you handle this challenge?
M. Kapasi -We have an anti-piracy division that manages this part but my experience of downloading pirated content has been appalling to say the least.
Q. What is the size of the Home Video market in India? What is your share of this size?
M. Kapasi -The current size of the legitimate home video market in India is about Rs.250 crore and growing; we have a 10% market share.
Q. The Children home video Market is expected to grow, what are your plans for this?
M. Kapasi -We already dominate the Children infotainment or edutainment space. Plus we continue to acquire more and more content in this space and the special interest category. Also, from this year onwards we would be also distributing DreamWorks Animation via Fox plus the Blue Sky Movies which will make us the single largest theatrically released feature animation distributor in the country. Besides this, we also have direct to video animation features from Marvel and a large portfolio of independent content through our agreement with Toonz.
Q. Can you tell us the average film acquisition cost (Hindi Movie)?
M. Kapasi –It varies, there are too many factors involved here viz. size of release, production house/cost, timing of release, theatrical success, critical acclaim, awards, franchise, etc., etc., hence an average is not only difficult but meaningless too.
Q. Do you have any plan of venturing into the South Cinema space?
M. Kapasi -No.
Q. Can you tell us about your distribution strength?
M. Kapasi -We are a national distributor covering the length and breadth of India, our presence stretches across large format retail chains to mom-n-pop outlets serviced through wholesalers. We also service through all online stores in the country.
Q. Do you have a global presence?
M. Kapasi -We are currently focusing on the Indian subcontinent but through our relationships we can exploit and reach many countries across the globe.
