Ticketplease Launch

Update: A TicketPlease.com spokesperson informs MediaNama that Devgn and Sanjay Dutt are promoters and shareholders of the venture, along with Nitin Manmohan, Jimmy Mistry and Amit Sharma. The portal is registered under Manmohan’s OneUp Arts Pvt. Ltd. Additionally, tickets for Yamla Pagla Deewana will be available on ticketing portals other than TicketPlease, but TicketPlease will be the ‘online ticketing partner’ for the film. As of today the site only shows Fun Cinemas listings for Delhi/NCR region.

Jan 7th 2011: A new venture in the online ticketing space, TicketPlease.com, will be launched on the 10th of January 2011; according to a press release, the ticketing business will cover movies, concerts, plays and sports events, and is being launched by Bollywood actor Ajay Devgn. The site will also feature film reviews, celebrity news, online chats, blogs, videos and photographs, and retail DVDs, music CDs and movie merchandise.

While the nature of Devgn’s involvement with the venture isn’t specific (the press release is vague and low on detail), a check on Linkedin reveals the following: TicketPlease.com is a venture of OneUp Arts Pvt. Ltd, part of Bollywood producer Nitin Manmohan’s OneUp group. The website will launch with Devgn buying the first tickets for the upcoming movie “Yamla Pagla Deewana”, which is produced by Manmohan.

From LinkedIn, we also learn that Hemanshu Jain, who was a marketing executive at HDFC standard Life Insurance, Heads the Online Marketing and Strategic Alliance for the business. Interestingly, TicketPlease appears to have roped in a former BookMyShow exec: Bhavisha Davda, as Senior Manager Operations.

Nikhil adds:

TicketPlease (On Twitter, On Facebook) will compete with sites like Bigtree Entertainment’s BookMyShow.com and Kyazoonga.com on ticketing, but we’re not sure if YPD tickets will be limited to TicketPlease only. It’s a difficult situation: for the online ticket sales to be a success, the producers would prefer to maximise distribution with multiple sites.

However, in order to build the online business, TicketPlease would prefer exclusive rights to ticketing. What happens if several Bollywood Producers and/or actors launch their own online ticketing venture? This is an aggregators game, and about creating ticketing destinations.

Also, more and more Bollywood businesses getting involved in the digital space now: Rajshri Media may have been the first, but of late, even Shekhar Kapur and AR Rahman have also launched a digital business.