The estimated $15-million Vuclip has been on a roll ever since PCCW Media, a part of Hong Kong's dominant telco, acquired it last year. The eight-year-old video-on-demand (VoD) platform claims 9 million subscribers per quarter across nine countries. After Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia, Viu, its online video app came to India last week. Vanita Kohli-Khandekar spoke to Nickhil Jakatdar, founder and CEO, Vuclip. Edited excerpts.
Why get into OTT now? Isn't it rather overcrowded?
There are three key challenges we have addressed as a streaming VoD platform in the last eight years. One, how do you build a strong technology platform on a low quality network (which exists in many emerging markets, including India). We did it with a proprietary technology that offers unbuffered viewing experience across all mobile devices and on any network.
And three, content is important but packaging it correctly is more important. You could get completely different consumption patterns if it is not packaged correctly.For example iconic movie scenes do better than complete movies, regional content does very well and so on.
So half of our founding team are PhDs in video streaming and the other half in data mining. We just pore over hundreds of terabytes of data to figure out what to put and remove.
In 2007 we launched as a free, open service and found that people from all over the world were coming onto the platform. By 2012 we moved the high-engagement stuff behind a paywall. In 2015 we realised that consumers are more interested in an app. But all our investors were from Silicon Valley. We figured we needed to becomea media company. So the PCCW deal happened and we have been launching in each of our markets.
But there are so many video apps..
What is it that the user will come to us for? In India the big insight is that if video is buffering you have lost the consumer, thumbnails are critical, user experience is key. Many of the OTT apps look similar and if I switched brand names it would be hard to tell one from the other. So we got the best user experience designer to move to India and apply best practices from the US market to India.
Will you be an aggregator or get into production?
We launched the first Viu original, What the Duckyesterday (last week).(It is a freewheeling chat show that will reveal the funnier side of India's cricketing legends says the press release).
Why get into OTT now? Isn't it rather overcrowded?
There are three key challenges we have addressed as a streaming VoD platform in the last eight years. One, how do you build a strong technology platform on a low quality network (which exists in many emerging markets, including India). We did it with a proprietary technology that offers unbuffered viewing experience across all mobile devices and on any network.
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Two, was the challenge of what will people watch on the mobile, it could not have been the same as TV. We needed consumer insights but that was not possible through just survey results - because very often consumers don't know what they want or there are practical constraints.
And three, content is important but packaging it correctly is more important. You could get completely different consumption patterns if it is not packaged correctly.For example iconic movie scenes do better than complete movies, regional content does very well and so on.
So half of our founding team are PhDs in video streaming and the other half in data mining. We just pore over hundreds of terabytes of data to figure out what to put and remove.
In 2007 we launched as a free, open service and found that people from all over the world were coming onto the platform. By 2012 we moved the high-engagement stuff behind a paywall. In 2015 we realised that consumers are more interested in an app. But all our investors were from Silicon Valley. We figured we needed to becomea media company. So the PCCW deal happened and we have been launching in each of our markets.
But there are so many video apps..
What is it that the user will come to us for? In India the big insight is that if video is buffering you have lost the consumer, thumbnails are critical, user experience is key. Many of the OTT apps look similar and if I switched brand names it would be hard to tell one from the other. So we got the best user experience designer to move to India and apply best practices from the US market to India.
Will you be an aggregator or get into production?
We launched the first Viu original, What the Duckyesterday (last week).(It is a freewheeling chat show that will reveal the funnier side of India's cricketing legends says the press release).