For the last 4 weeks or so we have been hard at work on our business plan. After 4 years of running our own business, it is time to get some cash infusion to do bigger and better things… Part of putting any business plan together is looking at shitloads of industry specific research as back ups for your own projections. Normally, in stuff like this you quote industry body reports on growth, returns, expectations etal… And normally one tends to use one of the two reports that are put out by the industry FICCI Frames or the Confederation of Indian Industries reports…..

However, this year the number of flaws and errors in the FICCI Frames report makes it virtually unusable. The TV portion is vague .. their content market figures estimated at 9 billion INR (900 crores) seems grossly underestimated, especially given that last year's hours of original content was pegged at 32,000 hours+ hours of programming. On an average a large General Entertainment Channel (GEC) spends about 250 to 300 + crore rupees on content. This doesn't include regional, niche and other channels including news. With news one can take the stance that the costs don't really come into content but into personnel and infrastructure, and even if you discount news the figure is a lot higher than 900 crores. More likely to be INR 1500+ crores ( we did a back of the envelope calculation, and once it is validated I will post that). But, their figure can be defended.

But, what cant' be defended and what is a truly glaring piece of erroneous research is the following :

(source : page 107 of the FICCI Frames: Indian Entertainment & Media Industry Report, 2008) 

My serious suggestion is click on the JPEG to see the figures it will show the following gems :

Andaman & Nicobar and Arunachal Pradesh (we won't even go into the logic of this clubbing) has 1546 Cinema  screens.

Tamil Nadu has 6 Cinema  screens

Uttar Pradesh has 3  Cinema  screens

And the rest are equally ridiculous. Maharashtra (excluding Vidarbha) , according to the report has  95 Cinema  screens. (aside - i wouldn't be surprised if the Mumbai suburbs has 95 cinema screens

I can only surmise that the reason that China wants to take over Arunachal Pradesh and the reason why Andaman and Nicobar is sinking and the reason why Uttar Pradesh has so much crime is because of the number of cinema screens. With this kind of data, we are going to end up with equally wonky causality :) 

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Tags: Cinema Screen, FICCI Frames, Films, India, Media, Number of Theatres in India, Research, Theatres, TV