Gurgaon based Pariksha Labs, a 5 year old R&D software service provider, launched a website and an app called Filmy Filmy which transliterates English to Hindi, when looking for a song or a title on the website. The website itself comes in Hindi by default but there’s a language option at the bottom where users can switch to English. It appears that Pariksha Labs had been working on this feature since sometime last week. (h/t: Pariksha Labs)
Interestingly, so far, after checking all the top music streaming websites in India, it seems that Filmy Filmy is the only site which offers English to Hindi transliteration in its search bar. I checked Gaana, Raaga, Rdio, Wynk, Guvera and Hungama, all of them had English inputs for their search bars.
On Filmy Filmy, users can create, share also also buy playlists while listening to Indian songs on the platform, and watch videos. The platform claims to have over 30,000 Indian movie songs. It also claims that users can save and access their playlists from any device.
MediaNama’s Take
This move makes us think as to why major music streaming companies are not doing this. It seems only a natural move to have a local language interface, given we’re in a country where English is not the primary language, but more importantly, the adoption of smartphones in India, which is on the rise, is coming not just from cities but also from smaller towns and villages.
In terms of putting together an Indian language interface, it does not seem like a terribly difficult job to do and we think that all other sites should have Indian language interfaces for the exact same reasons stated above. Not only that, the consumption of the local language content is also likely to shoot up once the users are familiar using the service in their languages. Its about time that India’s music streaming sites took notice of this and offered an interface which would be suitable across all sorts of users.
78% Indian users prefer video content in local languages: Last month, mobile VOD company Vuclip conducted a survey in April this year on global video insights across 8,500 users in emerging markets of India, the Middle East, South East Asia and Africa. The study found that in India, 78% of its users prefer watching content in their native languages. Hindi videos account for over 40% of viewership traffic in India, followed by Tamil at 8%, Telugu at 6%, Bengali and Marathi at 4% each.
Indic CTRs higher than English ones: At last year’s #NAMA conference, OneIndia MD BG Mahesh said, “We try and explain that the CTR’s (Click Through Rates) are almost four times. An English creative gets 0.1% to 0.15%. A language creative can get 0.4-0.5% CTR”. We had also pointed out that sharing of Indic language links is a problem as well, and we wonder how things will change once Indic domain names are launched.
