Times Now On Nautanki.tv; Thoughts On Video Content Online

Times Now, the English news channel from the BCCL (Times of India) Group will be going live on Nautanki.tv’s network, Nautanki CEO Sunil Nair informs us. Nautanki.tv is an online video network, with widgets spread across more than 6000 sites. Available online will be Times Now’s prime time show The Newshour, and feature shows No Full Stops (health) and The Foodie (a food and travel show). Times Now intends to eventually expand its offering on the network. 

Nautanki.tv has a strategic investment from Hungama (Virtual Marketing India Ltd), and claims that around 20% of their publishers are bloggers covering news, analysis, finance etc. Nautanki.tv also has content available from another BCCL TV channel - Zoom TV, as well as STAR TVs Channel [V]. 

Thoughts On Online Video Content In India, and Advertising

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MovieBeam To Be Launched For Consumers In India, Hospitality Sector In US

Rajesh Mishra, CEO (India) of UFO Moviez said at the IAMAI Digital Entertainment conference yesterday that the company intends to launch MovieBeam in India in around 6 months. Moviebean is essentially a push video on demand service, which requires a separate set-top-box. “If there are four films releasing this weekend, I’ll push those films to you. There’s no streaming, and you will be able to watch a first day first show at home. This model can earn as much as Rs. 5 crores for 1 show.” Well, we’ll leave the projections aside for a while, given that MovieBeam hardly found any buyers in the US…

Responding to our question on how UFO Moviez intends to make a service that has failed miserably in the US, work in India, Mishra said that while the techonology was right, the business model wasn’t. MovieBeam will soon be launched with a different business model for the Hospitality sector in the US, and in India, they’ll focus on making the service more viable. Why would the user pay for yet another set-top-box? “They may not have to. Even Digital Cinema distribution did not work in the US, but we made it work in India,” Mishra told me at the sidelines of the conference. The MovieBeam box in India may also come with a number of additional features - like DVD storage and Internet connectivity, though UFO will have to establish a return path for Internet.

More on the MovieBeam acquisition here.  

Rediff’s Open Platform Initiative Sociali Goes Live; Only 11 Apps?

Rediff has gone live with applications on their video sharing platform iShare, just in time for the announcement of their second quarter earnings results. What’s rather odd is that they appear to have gone live with only 3 applications so far:
– Qwiz (160 users)
– Dedicate A Song (516 users)
– OMG It’s SRK (Oh My God, It’s Shah Rukh Khan) (76 users)

Take a look at 3 applications around this clip

Only 11 Apps In 3 Months?
Rediff had created a separate social network Social, as a “sandbox” for application developers to test their apps. I logged in, only to find a list of just 11 apps, three of which we’ve mentioned above. The rest:

– Groups (create groups, 11 users)
– Rocks Papers Scissors (133 users)
– Gifts (gifts for friends, 162 users)
– ulaT-palaT ke joRo (Word Game, 47 users)
– aTuniTu joDinchu (Word Game, 12 users)
– tAvi tAvi joDicer (Word Game, 14 users)
– ulaToon-palaToon joDA (Word Game, 28 users)
– Events (manage your events, 22 users)

(Screencap of apps page)

So what’s going on with Rediff? Remember that in the last earnings conference call, Rediff CEO Ajit Balakrishnan had said that “Our platform is such that almost every 10 days to two weeks, you’re going to see new verticals open.” An entire quarter later, it’s just iShare, and just 11 applications. Have there been some technical glitches, is there simply no developer interest, are there not enough application developers in the world, or is there something in the terms and conditions that developers don’t agree with?

Perhaps, it’s just that applications going live and spreading will attract more developers. In that case, the entire success of the developer platform depends on the update.

Related:
– Sociali: Rediff’s Social Network, Or Just A Developer Sandbox?
– Rediff Earnings Call With Ajit Balakrishnan: Why Rediff Opened Its API
– Rediff To Open Up Its API; Launching Developer Platform Based On Facebook Markup Language, OpenSocial

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

Tata Communications Invests $11.5 Million In Content Delivery Network BitGravity

Update: Businessweek has an article on why TataComm invested in BitGravity - it’s something that all telcos are doing: “Level 3 Communications joined the fray in 2007, followed by AT&T in June of this year. A month later, Reliance Globalcom, another big Indian carrier, cut a deal to tap the CDN operated by Atlanta-based Internap Network Services. On the heels of the Tata BitGravity hookup, analysts say, are British Telecom (BT) and Verizon Communications (VZ).” This is because of the global increase in consumption of video content. Note - contrary to what Businessweek claims, CDNs don’t reduce bandwidth consumption; they just speed delivery of content.

Original Story: Tata Communications (formerly VSNL) has invested $11.5 million in convertible debt in BitGravity Inc, a next-generation content delivery network (CDN) used for interactive broadcasting. Note that Tata Communications had announced a strategic partnership with BitGravity in March 2008, for a service targeting Europe and Asia. John Hayduk, CTO of Tata Communications, has joined the BitGravity board. The amount of

What’s interesting is that just around a month ago, BitGravity had raised $2.5 Million in funding from Allen & Co and Sling Media Founder and CEO Blake Krikorian. So that’s $14 million in all.

TataComm and BitGravity will offer a co-branded service, innovatively branded as “Tata Communications’ CDN Powered by BitGravity”. Riding on Tata Communications’ infrastructure gives BitGravity access to, according to the release, access to 200 countries across 300 Points of Purchase (PoPs).

In India, the Tata Communications-BitGravity combo faces competition from another operator - Reliance Globalcom, which, a couple of months ago, announced a tie-up with NASDAQ listed Internap. The other two are Akamai and Limelight, both fairly well established in India, particularly when it comes to content delivery for media portals.

SeventyMM Gets $11.4 Million In Series C Round Led By NEA-IndoUS Ventures; Change Of Business Model?

SeventyMM, the online movie rental business, has made another pit-stop, and will chug along for a few more laps. Refueling the business with close to Rs. 50 crores ($11.4 Million) are NEA-Indo US Ventures, and VCs from earlier rounds - Matrix Partners India, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and ePlanet Ventures. Vani Kola of NEA-Indo US Ventures has joined the board. [via Television Point]

In the movie rentals space, SeventyMM competes with BIGFlix from Reliance ADA Group and Showtime from Nimbus. In the world cinema downloads space, they’re competing with Gaurav Dhillons Jaman.

SeventyMM has changed tracks: they were probably being lapped again and again by the movie pirates, and the web 1.0 model has been replaced a one which has a bit of both - user interactivity and movie rentals. Some of you may remember that the Web 2.0 model was deemed a waste of time last year by investor Avnish Bajaj of Matrix Partners, an investor in SeventyMM.

The brand new look - with video clip promos, a photo, audio and video gallery, also allowing users to upload content in these formats. I do hope they’re not penalized for users uploading copyrighted content since the Digital Millenium Copyright Act isn’t applicable in India. Apart from that they also have quizzes and other features, trying to involve the fan base. But there isn’t any advertising yet on SeventyMM, so it appears that they’re currently seeking to convert those discussing movies and browsing promos, into customers.

What SeventyMM hasn’t done yet, is launched the online movie streaming and movie downloads they had mentioned here in September last year, and neither do we see any edutainment services.

So far, they’ve raised around $21.4 Million - $11.4 million in this round, and around $10 million in previous rounds (pdf). Note that SeventyMM had acquired Delhi based movie rental business MadHouse, a little over a year ago. Madhouse founders have since quit to launch Morpheus Venture Partners.

Jaman Gets NDTV Lumiere Content; Launches Ad-Supported Streaming

NDTVs World Cinema brand NDTV Lumiere has tied up with Jaman.com to offer its content for download (rental) at $2 a film. They’re launching with the release of Mika Kaurismaki’s films. The rentals will be for 7 days, and it doesn’t appear that the content will be available for streaming; Jaman has launched advertising supported streaming of video content.

Gaurav Dhillon, founder and CEO of Jaman had told me in April about their plans to makde standard definition content available for streaming online - and more like a TV experience. Around 53 percent of Jaman’s traffic come from India, and India is more of a streaming market than a download to rent market. So I wonder if NDTV has actually pushed for the download model; they’re targeting India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives through Jaman.

Jaman’s Bollywood section currently features 92 movies, some from its deal with Eros, which they inked in May. In all they have 120 Indian films, 28 of which are not available for India. Now that it has added an advertising model, I see Jaman facing an issue convincing advertisers who seek large numbers in a specific geography, about advertising to a disparate audience. Dhillon had said they’ll target global advertisers, but I think that will mean they’ll have to get each brand managers from each country involved. Perhaps an ad-network tie-up might be on the cards. From a consumers perspective, here’s a valid comment from the NDTV Lumiere forum - that the flow of a World Cinema film is broken if there are breaks or an advertisements. But guess that’s the price you pay for watching a film ad-supported, instead of renting it.

Other movie streaming sites targeting India include BigFlix and Rajshri Media

Related:
– Rajshri Media To Break Even By Year End Says Rajjat Barjatya; Rajshri.com Revamp, Mobile Portal, Syndication Business
– Part 2: Rajjat Barjatya On Video Advertising & Networks, Regional Language, Short-Form vs Long-Form Content & Rajshri Media’s Broadband Studio