AI in Multiplexes, the 'cold open' scene is here

Would AI remove all the walls in, and around, Cinema; or would it create very personalized boxes for every viewer? Here's a peek. No Spoilers here. But some Stingers for sure.

- By Pratima H

JITENDER VERMA

Chief Information Officer, PVR INOX Limited

Has technology moved from being just a Gaffer to a Show-runner? Will AI become less of a non-diegetic sound and more of a diegetic one? And most importantly, will content continue to chase the challenge of being a Foley-sound when it comes to new technology scripts - inserted way later after the main scene is shot? Also, while we are at 'breaking the third wall', how soon can we have 'Bandersnatch' moments in India? Many plot twists are happening in the tale of technology in the land of theatres. And India's leading film exhibition company- with 1744 Screens across 355 properties in 111 cities (India and Sri Lanka) at the last count - seems to be already doing a thrilling and smooth swish-pan move across AI, Audience and new Cinema experiences. Jitender Verma, Chief Information Officer, PVR INOX Limited gives us a thrilling match-cut shot of cool technology and futuristic Cinema experiences. Let's 'dolly zoom' in, shall we?

Give us please, first, a jump-cut view of PVR and Inox coming together- from the angle of integrating all the IT, on both sides?

It was an exciting journey that began one and a half years back. Our priority was back-end integration. We first covered various systems that were critical and related to operations. Our approach was to adopt one of the two systems for areas like sales, PoS, Payments, infrastructure etc. We rolled out these projects and completed them in March last year. There were some systems which were kept common in the combined entity. The next leg of integration was on B2C areas of our roadmap. Here we covered websites, apps and relaunched some areas. We still have separate apps for PVR and Inox because we do not want to interfere with customer comfort and brand recall too soon- but we have tried to create a unified customer journey.