BookMyShow Starts "BookMyShow Online" For Live Events

Due to coronavirus pandemic, all the scheduled Bollywood releases and live events have come to a halt, and leading companies whose bread and butter where these platforms are now striving hard for other alternatives to keep their business going.

Bollywood releases are heading towards the OTT platforms and artists are organising live events using ZoomApp and the likes. 

To stay abreast, movie and event ticket booking platform BookMyShow has also come up with its virtual in-home entertainment platform- BookMyShow Online.

India's leading out-of-home entertainment and ticketing company, has developed its own virtual video streaming platform, this time exclusively for live events. This platform will offer paid and free events across categories such as comedy, music, and other content performances, to its users not only in India, but also in the UK, USA, North America, the UAE, South East Asia, Germany and West Indies.

Book My Show has also partnered with Brightcove, a global video solution platform, to power the use of the new BookMyShow Online platform.

BookMyShow Online will have live events across different genres like music, comedy, upskilling educational master-classes, international concerts featuring global artists, all in partnership with Live Nation.

Parikshit Dar, co-founder and director, BookMyShow said, “We were agile enough to change track by introducing virtual in-home entertainment offerings in India and other global markets.” He added, "The platform was born out of the need to make virtual live entertainment, a friction-less and hassle-free viewing experience."

He further said, “Our entire business was sort of revolving around movies and events. Covid-19 gave us an opportunity to re-look 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.”

Right now the BookMyShow Online is in its testing phase, where it has hosted over 30 events, that include its first-ever global virtual tours of Latin musician Willie Gomez, American music artist Taylor Castro, and Australian pop band The Buckleys performances amongst others.

Later this month, BookMyShow Online platform will host its first ever virtual music festival, the Sunburn Home Festival, that will showcase the virtual live experience of the music concert.

Parikshit Dar said that while most of the events were free earlier, now about 65% of virtual steaming events on BookMyShow 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.

This home entertainment and ticketing company plans to roll out a subscription model in the coming months for its users as currently the monetisation runs via pay-per-view format. To curb piracy and security, all the streaming content will be watermarked along with download restrictions.

The company has also shifted their area of interest from movies to live events, and the new BookMyShow Online platform may prove to be milestone in the coming days.