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…

Rajshri Media Gets T-Series Content; Sets Up Regional Offices In Delhi, Chennai; More To Follow

Updated below
Rajshri Media has inked a deal with T-Series, the largest aggregator of music content in India, to “promote the Bollywood titles of T-Series” on its video-on-demand web streaming site Rajshri.com. In a sense, this deal echoes a similar deal that Rajshri Media had struck with Eros International to share short form streaming content - song clippings, promos and movie scenes.

How does this help? Well, the timing is apt - T-Series has just released a movie called Karzz, and they’ll look at the music videos and promos as a means of promoting the movie. Much of the buzz is around new movies when they’re released - take a look at Google trends for Himesh and Karzz, and you’ll notice a recent spike in search queries. Rajshri will look to use the fresh content to attract viewers for their library of film content.

Do note that T-Series appears to have a tie-up Rediff’s iShare as well, but I don’t think they’ve announced it - their movie promos section features videos from Karzz.

I wonder if these are just barter deals - one gets promo content, the other publicity, or is there money and a revenue share involved. If you know - do tell.

Update from Rajshri Media:

The company has set up offices in Delhi and Chennai. Operating out of Delhi on the Ad Sales side are Ajay Bandhoo and Shobhit Agarwal, from Exchange4Media and ClickJobs respectively, while Ravneet Munjal, formerly with the India Today Group, is heading Content Acquisition. In Chennai, Palaniappan has going to look after content acquisition, with an eye on adding more regional content. Rajshri Media also intends to expand its presence to Bangalore, Hyderabad and Kolkata soon. In Mumbai, they’ve appointed Shashank Sathe as the CTO, and Vishnu Kant Gokul as VP for Ad Sales. COO Ravi Nalappa and CTO William D’Souza moved out a few months ago.

On the content front, Rajshri Media has also added content from  Web18, and will feature Bollywood film reviews from film critic Rajiv Vijayakar.

Related: Rajshri - Eros Deal

Part 2: Rajjat Barjatya On Video Advertising & Networks, Regional Language, Short-Form vs Long-Form Content & Rajshri Media’s Broadband Studio

Note: please download the audio file for the interview

Some excerpts from the Interview:
Broadband Studio
…it’s still all about telling a story, and now making a unicast model interactive; we’re working on a recommendation engine. Our broadband studio is very similar to a traditional studio, it’s just that we are a web and mobile studio. We have invested in content creation infrastructure - a shooting floor, recording studios, edit suites, a significantly large storage capability, all within the four walls of our office. We’re able to - in terms of speed, cost and efficiency - create video content. Our future lies in IP which we create for new media platforms.

Video Advertising
Short form content allows us ad units - a pre-roll and an overlay. Does that 30 second pre-roll still stand in short form, or will it irritate the audience? I’m very clear that in case of medium and long form content, the pre-roll, mid-roll, overlay and post-roll, all four will remain. That’s the only way you can monetize long form content. The rules change when we move towards short-form programming. YouTube is clear that they’re going to go with overlay, not pre-rolls. Joost thinks differently - they believe in medium and long form content. Each online video streaming website thinks differently regarding the bouquet of content and advertising.

Video Advetising Networks
We’ve tied up with around half a dozen video advertising networks in the US. They are our bread and butter, reaching out to an affluent ethnic audience in North America, which is over 80 percent of our traffic. The Indian traffic is small, but growing rapidly. And with mass content like Akbar Birbal remixed, we do see an audience from India coming to Rajshri.com.

Video advertising is in its infancy in India. Our experience with US based video ad networks has been positive, simply because they are high up the learning curve. What we do find is the lack of standards in terms of the ad units - the length of the video stream, the size of the file, should a pre-roll go with a companion banner ad or not, the rates in the market, the commissions charged by agencies vs networks. A lot of people are experimenting. It’s a matter of time. The Indian ad networks should also not blindly go by US rules - the Indian content is different. Indian films are 3 hours long, double of a Hollywood film. We don’t have a concept of seasons in the TV industry…

Also in the audio - More on Video Advertising, Plans for Regional Content, Short-Form vs Long-Form content, Syndication business and Conflict of Interest, Differentiation and more.

Part 1: Rajshri Media To Break Even By Year End Says Rajjat Barjatya; Rajshri.com Revamp, Mobile Portal, Syndication Business

In Part 3 (coming soon) - The making of Akbar Birbal Remixed, Internet vs Mobile, Working with Mobile Operators, Repurposing content into audio, video, SMS, Ringtones, Games, Video advertising on Mobile

Rajshri Media To Break Even By Year End Says Rajjat Barjatya; Rajshri.com Revamp, Mobile Portal, Syndication Business

Note: please download the audio file for the entire interview

Rajjat Barjatya, MD of Rajshri Media had told MediaNama.com that the company is likely to be in the black before the end of this calendar year. In the first part of this fairly candid and comprehensive interview, Barjatya talks about his role after Gurmeet Singh has joined as CEO (from Music Today), where the next level of growth for the company is going to come from, breaking even and how they are going to achieve it, plans to launch a Mobile Internet portal, downloads vs streaming, India vs International Markets, and more.

Note: Tomorrow we’ll publish Part 2 of this interview, focusing on Video Advertising and networks, Syndication business, Short Form vs Long Form content, Local Language Content, Traffic, Exclusivity of content, Differentiation in a crowded marketplace, Broadband Studio model and more.

Some excerpts from Part 1 (14 minutes):

Haven’t you’ve got higher margins on downloads - at around 70c cost, and $9.99 sales? Isn’t it in your interest to push downloads?
No. In case of downloads, there are two significant costs - one is the content payout, and in our case we would pay around 50 percent on an average, and the second cost is that of bandwidth. Downloads do have healthy margins, and so does ad-supported streaming.

But there would be inventory sale issues with ad-supported streaming, right?
In the beginning, for any platform which is ad-supported, there will be inventory issues.

It appears to me is that Rajshri Media is not in the black…
It’s not in the black. It will be before this calendar year ends. We’re making all efforts to ensure that that happens.

What are you doing to make sure that happens?
We’re scaling up things at multiple levels - whether it is our content offering - a combination of content which we create, to content which we aggregate across multiple languages and multiple channels. We’re just in the process of converting a lot of Baba Ramdev content for which we have exclusive Web, Mobile and IPTV rights. Today that is available for download only. We will soon make that free streaming, and bump up our video streaming and advertising volumes. We will make Vivah available for free streaming.

We’re completely revamping Rajshri.com - both front end and back end. A lot of social networking and web 2.0 features are being integrated - from communities around content and celebrities to users being able to upload content on Rajshri.com, which will be moderated. We’ll add a lot of Bollywood news, gossip, new film promos etc. Till now we focused on long form, and I think with a lot of news element coming in - it is very sticky, and allows us to experiment with a lot of short form content. But this is all video content essentially. At multiple levels, steps are being taken to ensure that our monetization increases. We’ve seen a very healthy month-on-month growth in revenues from YouTube, for example. We’re now getting into syndication relationships with many other online video streaming portals…

Wouldn’t that be competing with Rajshri.com? Because you’re just distributing your own content, not redistributing content from other content partners…
Yes, we are. Today less than 1 percent of the content on Rajshri.com is our own - that will explain the amount of content we have from other content partners, though not all of that content is available for sublicensing. We have around 1600 videos on the Rajshri YouTube channel, and that number is growing on a daily basis. We’ve just signed up with Joost, and will be signing up with MySpace very soon. I think we’re going to have a very strong syndication stream of revenue going forward. We’re also working with all mobile carriers, apart from BSNL and MTNL, and we’re seeing a very strong month on month growth in our telecom syndication revenues. I think it’s a combination of multiple revenue streams which is the future, and this is where Gurmeet comes in, to be able to drive each revenue stream.