CIOIN

Atul Luthra, head-IT

PVR

Executive summary

CIO 100 Winner: For the Rs 355-crore, 108-screen theater chain PVR, the loss of revenue due to the entry of unauthorized patrons was important enough to appear on its CIO's agenda. And with iCount the unauthorized entry of people in a theatre has been brought under control.

A quick search on the Internet will show you five ways of sneaking into a movie theater without a valid ticket. If you think the problem is not widespread enough to have insignificant cost implications, you would be wrong. For the Rs 355-crore, 108-screen theater chain PVR, the issue was important enough to appear on its CIO's agenda.

"The challenge was to check the loss of revenue due to the entry of unauthorized patrons. We initiated a project to compare the number of people in an auditorium against the number of tickets sold," says Atul Luthra, head-IT, PVR.

The most obvious solution was to manually verify every ticket just before and just after an intermission. But this approach would inconvenience paying patrons so Luthra looked at other solutions ranging from RFID on tickets, installing pressure sensors on seats, and thermal imaging of auditoriums but none were viable.

That's when Luthra came across iCount. The solution takes a photograph of an auditorium 40 minutes after a movie starts. It then compares this picture with the image of an empty auditorium. An application that Luthra and his team built in-house then compares the number of people in an auditorium against the number of tickets that were sold at the box office.

There was one big problem. How do you take a picture in a dark auditorium? Another challenge was the placement of the camera - if it was placed in front (where it can get a full picture of the auditorium) and used a flash, it would disturb movie-watchers. These were sorted out by using a high resolution camera with an appropriately adjusted aperture, which was placed in a corner next to the screen.

A pilot was tested with a Rs 4 lakh investment and now "the plan is to implement this project on all screens across India," says Luthra. "It's has already been rolled out in Mumbai." He estimates that the cost of covering all the chain's current screens should be around Rs 2 crore.

Figures from PVR demonstrate that the number of unauthorized entries has been brought down and payback should be achieved in about a year.