Rajshri Ties Up With Joost; Films On YouTube? Bipasha13

Rajshri Media has launched a channel on Joost, the Sequoia Capital funded online video content distribution platform. Rajshri will syndicate its library of feature films, music videos, TV shows etc. Joost monetizes content with advertising. I went through Rajshri’s Joost page, and noticed that they began adding content to Joost around a month ago. No full length films yet.

Joost features only professional video content, and hence is different from the user generated content environment that YouTube provides.

A month ago, Rajjat Barjatya, MD of Rajshri Media had told MediaNama that the company was planning to put up 100 full length movies on YouTube, starting mid-November. No full length movies have been uploaded either. We went through 800 of the 2900 videos on the Rajshri channel on YouTube, and couldn’t find any full length movies that have been uploaded over the last month. There are several episodes of TV serials Shaktimaan and Mahanagar that are over 20 minutes in length, and Yoga videos from Baba Ramdev that are over an hour in length each…but no full length films yet.

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Last month, we had contacted Google about pirated content on YouTube. At that time, we had written about a user named bipasha13 who had uploaded several films on the site, who had published the following films on YouTube, in mostly 10 minute parts:

– Golmaal Returns
– Karzz 2008
– Fashion
– Drona
– Mukhbir

We received a canned response from Google on the issue:

“We don’t control the content on our site. Our users post the content on YouTube — including videos, comments, and ratings. Our community guidelines and messaging on the site make it clear that users must own or have permission from copyright holders to post any videos. We take copyright issues very seriously.  We prohibit users from uploading infringing material and we cooperate with copyright holders to identify and promptly remove infringing content.”

As you can see, the videos are still up on YouTube. Looks like no one has reported them…

Yang Steps Down, As Yahoo Looks For A New CEO

An uneasy year so far for Yahoo has perhaps worsened with co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang stepping down, and the search for a new CEO…maybe even a CEO who will be able to negotiate a sale for the troubled company. Yang had replaced Terry Semel as CEO in June 2007.

The real trouble for Yahoo began when Microsoft made a public, and almost boisterous $44.6 Billion, $31 per share bid for Yahoo in February this year. At that time, Yahoo was trading at around $19 per share. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn, blasted Yang for being hostile towards the Microsoft deal, as Yahoo declined the offer. After the deadline for negotiations to be concluded lapsed, Microsoft withdrew the offer in May. Icahn, who owned almost 5% of Yahoo, tried to garner support for renegotiations with Microsoft, despite the announcement of an advertising partnership between Google and Yahoo, around Yahoo Search.  Eventually, Icahn settled for three board seats at Yahoo - including one for himself. 

However, a recent threat of an anti-trust lawsuit against the Google-Yahoo deal made Google withdraw. Read their blog post on the same here. That’s when Yang again sent out feelers to Microsoft, saying Yahoo willing to re-negotiate the deal though this time, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer declined.

BoomTown reported that Yang was stepping down - they published an internal mail sent out by Yang to Yahoo employees, here. Yang will return to his previous role as Chief Yahoo.

None of this is good for Yahoo - such an uncertain environment for a company impacts growth as potential partners may defer deals, and employees may look for more secure environs.

Google Files For Local Search And Mapping Patent In India

Google has filed for a patent in India, for a map based local search application. This appears to essentially be a patent for Google Local on Mobile, a service launched in 2005, and subsequently renamed/replaced by Google Maps for mobile.

The patent was filed in India on June 6th 2008, and you may view the details of the original patent at WIPO (here), or download the patent document (PDF) here. Using the application, users can zoom in into a map, and be provided with local business search results, directions for a travel route. Interestingly, the maps service can also include a click to call facility.

Not yet in the list above is Navteq which Nokia had acquired for $8.1 billion last year. Once Navteq becomes a part of the Ovi platform, I think it will emerge as a serious challenge for the likes of Google Maps and MapMyIndia. At the same time, from the operators side, we’ve heard some interesting things about Reliance’s yet-to-be-launched BIG Maps service.

PatentWatch: Google Files For India Patent For Detecting Copyright Content

On the 12th of June this year, Google filed for a patent in India for “Detecting Repeating Content In Broadcast Media”. The reason for filing this patent is not known, but we think it’s significant:

Google has been in trouble in India over copyright content being published on YouTube - particularly TV shows and Bollywood films that users upload. Often, users upload an entire Bollywood film in 10-15 parts. The “Safe Harbor” argument, which is applicable via the Digital Millenium Copyright Act isn’t applicable in India, and Google has even asked the Indian telecom regulator TRAI for immunity for platforms.

In the past, legal notices have been sent to Google by media companies like STAR TV (News Corp), Sony Entertainment Television and Saregama. Bollywood Music major T-Series has even taken them to court. I’ve attended a couple of these court sessions, during one of which Google had asked T-Series to give them “5000 of their copyrights” (i.e. copyrighted content), so YouTube can compare and remove the content.

So how does the technology work? Essentially, Google generates a database of audio statistics from content and compares it with stored data to determine whether the content has been stored in their database or not. If the content is detected in the stored data, it is identified as “repeating content”.

View the patent details here.

Related:
– Google Faces More Legal Issues In India; Pushes For Immunity For Platforms
– ContentSutra: YouTube And T-Series Given Time To Settle Copyright Infringement Dispute
– ContentSutra: T-Series Obtains Restraining Order Against Google And YouTube From Delhi High Court

Teething Troubles For Google’s SMS Channels In India; Battle At The SMSC

Update: Appears to be working fine now

If you’re a publisher who has set up a Google SMS Channel, it’s likely that you already know about this: Google has been having problems delivering SMS / text alerts since the launch. Some messages aren’t being picked up from the RSS feeds, they’re being delivered as much as a day late, or aren’t being delivered at all. We’ve faced these issues with the channel we had set up, and readers have SMSed us regarding undelivered messages (they’ve had to “poke” for updates), not just from the MediaNama channel, but also from Google News.

It’s likely that the problem is with the overburdened SMS Center (SMSC), which routes all the SMS traffic on an operators network. Below is a simple diagram of how SMS’ are sent and received in an operator network, for both pull and push services.

SMSCs can be both mobile operator managed, or set up by a third party. Assuming around 300 million SMS being delivered in India a day, that’s an average of around 3470 SMS being sent per second in India; some of the SMSCs of larger operators like Airtel, Idea and Vodafone will be handling substantially more traffic, and the number will obviously be higher for the daytime hours. As Thejo had mentioned in response to my comment on his blog, availability of bandwidth on the SMSC is huge issue, “one that will determine whether the service is going to do well.”

But the opportunity
The flexibility of converting RSS feeds to SMS’ is immense, and this is where Google has a distinct advantage. For example, you can take the RSS feeds for your GMail email, and create a separate, closed SMS channel, and set up an alert for every time you get a new mail. Similarly, you can do a Google News search, say, for “Lewis Hamilton”, and add that RSS feed to a separate Google SMS Channel. And you create your own news alert. Just like Google offers email alerts, I wouldn’t be surprised if they began offering SMS alerts of their service directly to users, without them having to manually set up an SMS channel.

But then there’s no point if you’re getting the alert a day late, or not at all.

Does MyToday Feel Threatened?
Rajesh Jain, MD of Netcore (MyToday) doesn’t think so. He tells WATBlog:

“When one is first in a market, there is bound to be competition sooner or later. In fact, in the coming months, I expect many more companies to enter this space. In the Internet too, IndiaWorld was the first portal (which I had launched in March 1995), and in the subsequent years we had various players enter the market. Over the subsequent years, many dropped out. IndiaWorld thrived, consolidated its market leadership position, and won…One (Google SMS) is a user-generated and ad hoc content, while we (MyToday) believe in offering editorial content with specific deliverables which help in creating habit in consumption as our recent Nielsen study (covering 5,000 users) had shown.”

What MyToday and GupShup have is a captive user base on SMS: that takes time to acquire, and people tend not to unsubscribe from free subscription services unless the spam becomes unbearable. It’s unlikely that one will cannibalize on the other, but for a publisher, the quality of the service is critical, and that battle will be won at the SMSC.

Related:

- Google Gets Into The Push SMS Business In India, Takes On MyToday, SMS Gupshup
– Analysis of the Cost of Push SMS Services

Google Gets Into The Push SMS Business In India, Takes On MyToday, SMS Gupshup

(To subscribe to the MediaNama channel, use this subscription form or SMS ON MEDIANAMA to +919870807070)

Google is making a habit of entering market segments in India that others have spent time and effort and money evangelizing: they did that to local language search and local business listings search, and now are trying to grab a piece of the Push SMS subscription pie. Via an email from a kind reader, we were informed about the launch of Google SMS Channels. Digital Inspiration had also written about it.

At the time of posting this, there are already 242 channels live on the site, many of them user created. As a publisher, or a sender, it’s a fairly simple process for creating an alert - just choose an available keyword, verify your mobile number, add an RSS feed as a content source, and you’re good to go.

The numbers, the numbers, the numbers
As we’ve mentioned earlier, the Push SMS business suffers from a problem of plenty - the more the number of users, the higher the cost. We’ve heard that bulk SMS rates have been coming down, and though none of the publishers or bulk SMS providers have confirmed this, we’re told that they’re now lower than Rs. 0.05 per SMS, or around $0.00108 (at Rs. 46.31 to the dollar).

If Google were to send as many as 10 million SMS per day, it amounts to a cost of Rs. 18.25 crores per year, which at the current conversaion rate is around $3.96 million. If the Rupee strengthens, then at around Rs. 40 to the dollar, it is around $4.56 million.

Do note that MyToday and SMS Gupshup claim that they’re sending more than 10 million SMS’ per day.

The monetization?
MyToday and SMS GupShup have tried to monetize the service with advertising. Netcore (MyToday) MD Rajesh Jain, in particular, has been evangelizing mobile marketing quite aggressively over the past couple of months, at several conferences. He’s coined a phrase called “Invertising”, or Invited Advertising. According to his calculartions, the Mobile Marketing business can be Rs. 1000 crores (around $215 Million) per year in 2 years - with Rs. 600 crores ($130 Million) from Invertising, Rs. 300 crores ($65 Million) from SMS advertising and Rs. 100 crores ($20 Million) from WAP advertising. Of course, there are a number of assumptions involved with the estimation:

Click on the image for an expanded view, or take a look at his presentation here (PDF). What I’d like to know is - what are the current CPM and fill rates for MyToday and GupShup?

The Search-Alert Opportunity
Mobile content and search startup Zook has already implemented alerts around their local search results. Sameer Shisodia, founder of Zook informs us that they are enabling SMS alerts related to local business search results. For example: for a query “Shoes Deals”, one  can select a city (Bangalore), and set up alerts for those. Google provides a similar service with RSS feeds for Google News Search results; They can monetize by incorporating SMS alerts for local business search, like Zook. However, Zook doesn’t appear to have an option for publishers.

MediaNama Channel
We’ve created a channel for MediaNama, which you may subscribe to:
– via this subscription form
– Or, via SMS: send ON MEDIANAMA to +919870807070

As and when we post updates, you will receive a WAP push as an alert, via SMS.  We already have a WAP site up - just visit medianama.com from your mobile handset.

Related:
– Analysis of the Cost of Push SMS Services

SMS 2.0 Integrates Search From Google, MSN, AskLaila And Others; The Opportunity For Affle

(Updated: To add Monster, Sulekha and Indiaproperty search via SMS 2.0)

Affle has integrated search into its popular SMS 2.0 application. I installed the application on Sunday and gave it ago. The search services included in SMS 2.0:

Airtel Live: Web Search powered by Google
Web-Live Search: Web Search powered by MSN
City Search: Powered by AskLaila
Job Search: Powered by Naukri (Info Edge), Monster and maybe others. Also pushing alerts - Rs. 10 for 10 days of SMS alerts
Property Search: Powered by 99Acres (Info Edge), Sulekha, Indiaproperty and maybe others. Also Rs. 20 for 10 SMS alerts

Some issues:
– The job search needs work. Only one job/property is displayed per search, and that too doesn’t utilize the location input offered by the mobile. For example - I searched for “Designer” and got a result from Mumbai, though I’m searching from Delhi. No option to switch from a Jewelery designer to a Web designer (Context). Verdict: Fails
– City search utilizes the locational input, but doesn’t have the option to change cities. For example, if I’m looking for a particular shop in Mumbai, but searching from Delhi, I don’t have a choice.

The opportunity for Affle
At over 750,000 subscribers (claimed), apart from the SIM Toolkit from a mobile operator or the mobile menu of a handset manufacturer, SMS 2.0 might just be the most well spread or distributed mobile application in India. Yet, the distribution of the mobile operator and handset manufacturer will be limited by their user base, while Affle has the opportunity of being pan-operator, and pan-handset manufacturer. Regular usage is also guaranteed, given that the application replaces the handsets default SMS application. Thus, with just upgrades alone, SMS 2.0 can integrate more services into the application.

I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these service providers or even content owners are actually paying for their content being displayed on SMS 2.0, or for enabling their search. A year or so ago, at a Mobile Monday in Delhi, the opportunity for a mobile desktop for services had been mentioned. The challenge for Affle lies is ensuring that the application remains uncomplicated, despite the integration of more services. The next big step for Affle would be to tie up with a mobile handset manufacturer for a pre-loaded application, or to offer their services to subscribers of other mobile operators as well. They can’t remain an Airtel-only app.

But above all, Affle needs to offer local language SMS capability, given that that’s where the next level of mobile growth is coming from.

What surprises me
is that no one has put out a competing product in the market, with other operators.

Disclosure: Affle’s Job and Property searches are powered by Info Edge India, of which I have a small number of shares.