Originally published by Sramana Mitra on LinkedIn: Indian Chain Brings The Cinema Experience To The Heartland

In this series, Sramana Mitra shares chapters from her book Vision India 2020, that outlines 45 interesting ideas for start-up companies with the potential to become billion-dollar enterprises. These articles are written as business fiction, as if we’re in 2020, reflecting back on building these businesses over the previous decade. We hope to spark ideas for building successful start-ups of your own.

In December 2005, Dominique and I traveled through North Bengal. We touched great mountains, deep valleys, shimmering rivers. We saw great forests waking with dawn and returning to slumber at nightfall. We touched the brink of life in the jungle. Not much was different here than in primordial times. A forest guard lived in a small shack at the mouth of a leopard- and elephant-infested forest. If he died, another took his place. Man survived here against the ever-present wild, where elephants rampaged through the forests, destroying crops, even killing villagers as they tried in vain to keep them at bay with mere firecrackers.

It was a place unparalleled for both its raw beauty and brutality. The scenery of tea gardens, betel nut woods, bay leaf plants, and cardamom bushes slowly rolled into hills, then mountains as we climbed towards Lava, at 7,000 feet, a splendid little Himalayan village far out by the Bhutan border. Surrounded by layers of Himalayan panorama, sitting in a small cottage facing the hue of the setting sun, we could not help but ponder the life of the villagers. At sundown, the village quiets, then sleeps. There was nothing to do. No cinema. No theater. No club. Low voltage electricity inadequate even for television. Consequently, alcohol was often a friendly companion to pass time around a fire.

Without enough light to read in our cottage, Dominique and I started discussing first the pure numbers – there were approximately 600,000 villages in India, with 600 million people living in such limited opportunity settings – and next the opportunity: an alternative entertainment vehicle, one more appealing than alcohol. Thus began our journey of building a chain of “community screens” throughout the heartland of India. Thus began Bioscope.

At the heart of Bioscope was a media server containing some 5,000 Bollywood movies with appropriate licensing rights, a projector, and a screen. Rather than full- fledged movie theaters, ours are akin to an elaborate home theater setup. We rent large rooms within each village to seat 35-40 people – effectively small movie theaters.

In five years, we built a presence in 100,000 villages. Come sundown, village women would don their best saris and drag their husbands to the Bioscope. Initially, the husbands complained. But soon, they were more excited than their women at the prospect of a swaying Ash or a swinging Hrithik.

Although we made arrangements with several banks to finance these franchises with microloans, our business plan was not to build a nonprofit. We wanted to build a media channel to reach the few hundred million people of rural India without television sets, and therefore off the regular media grid. Gradually, we hooked our franchisees up with a central server, such that we could transmit advertisements and other video clips before films and during intermissions. These advertising slots we sold to our network of corporations at a premium. And as our penetration numbers climbed, as we leapt from Maharashtra screens to Manipur screens, the advertising rates we commanded also skyrocketed.

Meanwhile, an interesting social dynamic developed in the villages around Bioscope. Villagers started treating the screenings as their primary place to see and be seen. People started showing up an hour or two before the show to mingle, chat, and match-make. After the movie, people hung around to discuss how the villain, Chhote Malik, seduced the unsuspecting Karina at the cinema. “Saale...,” they hissed. They hummed one of the seven songs from the film. Some danced. Soon, there was a party each night after the screening. Then cafés sprung up, where rumor mills spun and Coke found new customers; where marriages got brokered and Pepsi introduced new brands; where hearts got broken and Frito Lay got munched.

As the community bonded, Bioscope’s power to influence word of mouth increased exponentially. Not only were our advertisers aware of this power, the politicians were too. We became one of the primary channels of political advertising, as well as an excellent channel for spreading educational messages on topics as disparate as birth control, reproductive health, women’s empowerment, microfinance, and micro-franchise.

Banks were advertising heavily with Bioscope, spreading the message of mobile banking, as well as offering microfinance loans. In fact, we started collaborating with other micro-franchise ventures like Gagori, Palanquin, Camellia, and Patami. We made it infinitely easier for them to recruit new franchisees and scale their businesses.

Of course, we had programs that tied into these ancillary ventures. For example, we started our own “citizen journalism” effort, where each village had a reporter trained to capture video success stories about micro-entrepreneurs. Men and women like designer Chameli Rai and pharmacist Guru Desai. Success stories from one village were then played not only in that village, but in neighboring and distant villages alike, making celebrities of our micro-heroes. In the last decade, we have helped groom almost three million new micro-entrepreneurs in fields spanning furniture to candles to solar energy, and we have helped shape the sociopolitical consciousness of rural India. Not bad for so- called micro!

We also created independent programming about the sociopolitical issues that citizens of a successful democracy should understand, such as freedom of speech and rights of expression. Our philosophy of development through entrepreneurship was widely propagated, and leaders with policies supporting entrepreneurship development were offered opportunities to communicate with our audience through video conferencing.

In 2020, having penetrated 300,000 villages, we stepped back to take stock. Bioscope looks a lot like the early days of the movie theater – dust particles swimming in projector light – but fused with modern concepts like the video library, digital storage, media server, portable projectors, user-generated content, and citizen-journalism.

And this fusion has fundamentally altered the cultural fabric of rural India, infusing it with a sense of engagement and empowerment, while Bioscope has blossomed to become one of modern India’s most cherished media channels.