Manjari Fadnis and Yash Pandit at the music release of their film Rok Sako To Rok Lo. (PTI file picture)

New Delhi, Dec. 5: You don?t need to jostle in a queue at the multiplex to grab a ticket for the latest Bollywood blockbuster. Soon, you could view a full-length feature film on your mobile phone.

In what it claims is a worldwide first, Airtel plans to show a full-length movie, Rok Sako To Rok Lo, on mobile phone ?one day before it hits the movie halls.

Airtel?s gambit takes the scramble to offer value-added features to another plane. One caveat though: Arindam Chaudhary?s film will be shown only on Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE)-enabled mobile phones.

This is Airtel?s response to Reliance Infocomm and Hutch which have been offering subscribers similar options of downloading movie clips. Airtel?s EDGE is just a step short of 3G telecom services being introduced in Europe and a few Asia-Pacific nations that will offer streaming video and fast data downloads.

EDGE subscribers can catch the movie at 3 pm on December 9 at Airtel Live ? the multi-access mobile entertainment portal.

For Calcuttans, the event will be special. Airtel will launch the commercial EDGE service next week before the premiere of the movie.

A customer needs to visit the Airtel Live portal from the EDGE-enabled handset, click on the link for the movie which will start playing after a few seconds. The movie will be streamed live and will not require saving or storing any clips.

Mohit Bhatnagar, the vice-president, value-added service and new product development, Airtel, explained the operations behind the screen: ?Our engineers will play the movie at the Gurgaon office and the signals will be broadcast through dish antennae to a ?streaming server? that will transmit it to the EDGE networks. This is then broadcast and can be picked up by the EDGE subscribers of Airtel who log on to Airtel Live.?

Currently, the movie clips shown by the majority of the operators without EDGE are downloaded at 144 kilobits per second. Under test conditions, EDGE provides a download speed of 256 kbps.