AOL Launches Video Portal Site For India - videoportal.aol.in
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AOL India has just launched their Video Portal in India. The company is also launching video portals in Canada and Taiwan.
The website is being powered by Truveo – the search engine for videos across the web. So Indian content is basically being optimized from Truveo and being showcased on the AOL Video Portal.
So they are basically creating a platform by leveraging AOL’s brand to drive video views. Having said that, I don’t think AOL’s brand identity is as strong in India as one might imagine. They have had some good tie ups with MTNL – that might help.
The portal is displaying banner and flash based ads along with videos. The launch comes closely after YouTube launched its India Portal – YouTube.in. The key difference between the 2 is that YouTube has ‘Promoted Videos’ while AOL has ‘traditional’ Internet ads. AOL’s video portal also does not allow you to be upload videos. So it’s a one to many conversation. For India that may not necessarily be a bad thing. Not too many Indians are creating original video content anyway (except our WATShow :p).
Another announcement that came in from AOL last week was that of them allowing SMS to Indian Mobile Phones from AOL Mail and AOL Messenger. This is a smart strategy by AOL. Free SMS is currently a handy tool to lure Indian audiences. This should have come a few months back – or a year and half back would have been ideal.
AOL has also launched a South Cinema Channel. They have tied up with Galatta.com for movie content related to South India – the regional channel has content from Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu and Tamil cinema (all in English).
An interesting strategy by AOL India. They are going local and simultaneously setting up a regional presence. They have begun to understand that Indian Audiences prefer regional content. The Juxt Consult report that released recently also stressed on the fact that 70% of the representative sample would prefer to access the Internet in regional languages.
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they are making a mistake by launching videoportal through aol…..cos they should try to leverage truveo’s brand image…….as far as video search engine market is concerned truveo is the best product here as blinkx is useless cos they looking more into facial nd audio recognition…..which have no meaning for netizens……..that i say from personal experience 2…..nd wud be covering the whole video search market in my article…….