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Indian media company Pyramid Saimira Theatre announced a 76-million-dollar plan to create a 2,000-strong cinema network to cash in on the country's fast-growing digital movie business.

An Indian movie billboard in Kolkata
© AFP/File Deshakalyan Chowdhury

The company said it was investing 3,500 million rupees (76 million dollars) into expanding its 100-strong cinema network centred around the southern city of Chennai into a nationwide chain of more than 2,000 by 2010.

India has about 12,000 cinemas many of them independents and with varying levels of quality and comfort. The company said it had approached cinema owners across the country about long-term leases.

The company said it planned to use satellites to transmit films digitally across the country, cutting distribution and piracy costs.

A 2006 industry report identified the growth potential of digital cinema since the quality of prints deteriorated when they arrived in smaller population areas after opening in India's main cities.

The cost of producing a digital film was a quarter the cost of a celluloid print and helped curb the piracy that cuts box office collections by 90 percent, said the report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry earlier this year.

Pyramid managing director P.S. Saminathan said: "Getting cinemas is not a problem for us. Cinema people feel comfortable in handing their cinemas to us."

The Indian film industry is the largest by volume in the world, producing more than 1,000 movies in 2005 but accounting for only one percent of global film industry revenues.

The industry was worth an estimated 68 billion rupees (1.47 billion dollars) in 2005 and is expected to grow to 153 billion (3.31 billion dollars) by 2010, according to the PricewaterhouseCoopers report.

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