With convenience and interactivity as its plus points, Web TV has emerged in a big way in India
Last week’s coverage of the general elections brought the limelight back on web TV . This seems to have made Sunil Nair a content man. The CEO and founder of www.nautanki.tv, an online TV channel, claims that more than 5 million people from all over the globe saw the election broadcast online. “Nautanki tied up with Facebook and Zee News to provide live feed about Indian elections results on both online portals. To his delight, over 8,000 comments were recorded and each individual consumed around 30 minutes of the web content.
It started with Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration and went on to highlight UPA’s stunning victory last week. Welcome the emergence of web TV, which hinges itself on interactivity, timing and convenience.
It’s not only about current events, people are fast logging onto web to view content of various kinds. As an MTV India’s spokesperson puts it, it’s all about convenience. “People these days want to access content of their choice in terms of quality, as well as quantity.” The channel also believes that internet has become an engaging medium for the consumer. In other words, consumers are no longer a passive audience.
According to an online survey conducted by Nielsen, of the 45 million internet subscribers in India, nearly 63 per cent stream or download content on a PC or portable device. Nielson’s report captures the growing love affair of Indians with web videos. With every increase in penetration of internet, there’s been a raise in the usage of streaming content from the web, including audio tracks (66 per cent), music videos (59 per cent), ads or movie trailers (57 per cent), TV shows or TV clippings (46 per cent), full length movies or movie clips (42 per cent), and video games (32 per cent).
A point which is magnified by Deepali Narsiker, head of broadband services, Lehren Entertainment, an online TV channel, “Entertainment news has always been devoured by people across the world and the response which we get is terrific.” Lehren uploads its content, which includes Bollywood news, celebrity interviews, across sites such as YouTube, Daily Motion, Nautanki, BigAdda and BigFlix.
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MTV, on the other hand, to capitalise on the popularity of its flagship show Roadies , started MTV Roadies Battleground , a show which enabled people to post videos online to take home the tag of a Roadie . Last year, MTV got 300,000 hits on its Roadies video content online and expects the number to grow multifold this year too.
India’s appetite for video doesn’t seem to fade away. If anything, it is all set to increase in 2009, as consumers digest programming on television, the internet and their mobile devices. Says Arvind Desikan, head (B2C Marketing), Google India, “As the time gap between the broadcast content and web content reduces, consumers have a growing choice to consume diverse video content at their convenience, irrespective of their geography.”
YouTube India, which gets over 20 million page views every day, is evaluating Live TV platforms that aims to blur the distinction between traditional TV broadcasters and online delivery systems. Google’s YouTube turned online video clips from a niche interest into a mainstream phenomenon and now sees itself repeating the feat with live streaming. YouTube recently achieved a coup by enabling its users to submit questions to US Presidential candidates in a debate shown on CNN.
Independent film makers, too are slowly taking this route. However, Paromita Vohra, director of several short documentaries, including ‘Where’s Sandra’ , feels that as far as making money is concernedweb video is still not a viable medium. For instance, four of Vohra’s movies were a part of an online film festival and she says that the response was pretty good and yet it did not fetch her fat pay cheques. So does it lead to any commercial breakthroughs for content creators? “I think all it does is get you some recognition to begin with, pennies roll in much later,” she adds.
Nair’s video portal Nautanki, too, is working hard in sourcing original content from channels, even though he serves over 38 million unique videos to his 6 million viewers daily. He informs, “Nautanki has over 25 broadcasters, 300 content creators in eight languages in its kitty.” It is now planning to add content from European broadcasters and is also scouting for Malaysian, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic content partners, that will give plenty of free content choice to consumers.