Orange, the French telecom operator, has entered into exclusive negotiations to acquire 49% in video content site DailyMotion for EUR 58.8 Million (around $80 million). Orange will also have the option of completely acquiring the venture begining 2013, and also be allowed to bring in additional investors. Dailymotion, believed to be the the second largest online video site worldwide after Google owned YouTube, also has operations and partnerships in India: Hungama Digital Media provides Bollywood content and music to DailyMotion India, and through VDOPIA, sells video advertising targeting the Indian audience on the video sharing site. Apart from Hungama, there's a lot of official Indian content on DailyMotion:, from Rajshri Media, iStream.in, Saavn (ED: both Saavn and Hungama?), BollywoodBackstage, NDTV, Mid Day, NewsX, Lehren, GlamSham, among several others. Raajh Singh is Managing Director, DailyMotion India. Dailymotion has a billion videos watched each month, with 93 million unique visitors, and 80% of its audience outside France. How many of these are from India? DailyMotion, Orange: Aggregator Acquisitions In India In India, the perception has been that content owners would acquire aggregators (hypothetically: T-Series acquiring Hungama) to leverage their distribution capabilities across telecom operators, or that platform companies would acquire content (like OnMobile-SIMCA deal), or maybe (hypothetically, again) Ericsson acquiring Apalya. Of course, in India, it's not really about video, but ringback tones and music, but who's to say that the game wont change towards the mobile Internet, and increasing data consumption. An Airtel could acquire a video aggregator for a fraction…
