YouTube India’s BoxOffice channel boosted by a new movie deal

Nirvana Digital, a Mumbai based digital video aggregator and distributor, has teamed up with YouTube India to offer a part of its Bollywood films and music video catalogue available on YouTube’s ad-supported movie channel, BoxOffice.

For those who aren’t familiar with BoxOffice, it is an ad-supported movie channel where YouTube showcases one premium Bollywood/ regional movie for free, to its Indian audience every month. The sponsoring companies, in return get an opportunity to showcase their YouTube channel videos and promote their contests and campaigns on the BoxOffice channel page.

Medianama reports that this partnership will be on a revenue share basis and the content will include 70 movies and 5 documentaries from Nirvana Digital’s huge catalog of 200+ movies and 5000+ videos, including box-office hits such as Iqbal, Apna Sapna Money Money, Right Yaa Wrong and more.

Anis Tadvi, VP Distribution, Nirvana Digital said:

We are delighted to offer consumers a fine selection of Bollywood through YouTube’s platform, and we’re looking forward to adding more exciting content for the global Indian market. The growth in online video viewing has been exponential, and we look forward to helping content owners monetise their content whilst offering consumers world-class entertainment at the click of a button.

He further added that all content partnerships from YouTube India are currently on a revenue share basis until a brand sponsor is exclusively involved in the deal, in which case the monetization from Intellectual property rights is better.

Is this strategy working?

Although YouTube BoxOffice is showing more movies when compared to last month, there seems to be no change in the sponsors yet. Hence we are not too sure if this strategy is working for YouTube yet.

However, the nature of the contract between YouTube and its sponsors hasn’t been disclosed by the Internet video giant yet, so it may be a bit too early to draw conclusions on this move.