Mediamerx Launches SportPass.tv in India

MediaMerxInc, a company focussed on emerging markets has launched their online video property SportPass.tv in India.

Sportpass.tv is a sports video destination that aggregates the best and most relevant international sports videos from all over the world.

According to the Tejpaul Bhatia, MediaMerx’s CEO.
“A growing number of international sports fans are dissatisfied with the lack of locally relevant sports video online today. SportPass.tv will bring the latest in sports highlights and interviews from sports such as cricket, tennis, hockey, racing and more.”
“Behind the launch of SportPass.tv is an international team of sports enthusiasts and technologists who are creating a global sports network that is locally relevant for every sports fan in the world.”

What is their gameplan?

Media merx is trying to reach audience in third world countries where broadband speeds are a major bottleneck for the success of online streaming videos. They thus provides white labeled solution for ISP’s and also has a collabration with companies like peerapp to provide videos hoted on ISP servers to be broadcasted at wire speeds.

Although sportpass.tv is trying to address a pretty niche market of sports video what really lacks is the layout of the site’s design which do not provide much of a social interaction at all.

The site has good way of showing related videos with a short description and could have served useful purpose if more additional options like user uploading or categorisation of videos into different sections had been given.

MediamerxInc also owns another property named filmpass.tv which would also be launched with indian flavours pretty soon.

The new entrants in online video space are finding tough to compete with big players like Youtube, dailymotion etc and are thus focussing in serving niche markets.

This strategy has paid off in many cases as users looking for a categorised videos are now preferring these niche video sites as they provide more apt results for a particular search.

We caught up with Tejpaul Bhatia, MediaMerx’s CEO.

Mediamerx seems to focus on providing white label solution to ISP’s – elaborate? How far have you succeeded in India-any collaboration in offing?

MediaMerx provides white label and turn-key solutions to ISPs. Our turnkey solutions include www.SportPass.TV and www.FilmPass.TV and more that are in development. Some ISPs choose to license our platform and create their own media offerings. We are open to both types of relationships and have found that there is a need for both. Some of our earliest customers have requested more turn-key products like www.SportPass.TV and we have found that consumers have responded positively.

MediaMerx is just beginning its launch in India and has a few trials underway with large and small ISPs throughout the country. We are not at liberty to say with who just yet. We will be sure to announce our relationships when the time is right. MediaMerx has been servicing ISPs in other countries for over a year now and has clients and trial customers in South America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Our focus for the foreseeable future will be in India. In our opinion, it is one of the most important markets right now.

Where is the video content stored-freemium and premium content? How exactly the content is broadcasted-at wire speeds or at internet speeds?

Content can be stored on the public internet, on our content distribution network or on the private networks of our customers. The MediaMerx system configures the best architecture for the target audience. The biggest challenge for streaming video in countries like India is the clogged and unreliable backbone. Lack of peering between ISPs and overall poor infrastructure add to this problem. ISPs have made significant investments in improving the last mile connection into the home. The MediaMerx system maximizes this last mile pipe and tries to avoid any dependencies on the backhaul for content delivery into the users home. This allows us to maximize throughput for video streaming on sites like www.SportPass.TV and give the end user a superior video experience on the internet for when they want to see sports, music, movies and more on demand.

Does your business model has the ability to stand out even if the broadband speeds in so called third world countries improves significantly?will ISP still be interested in working with you?

We hope and pray that broadband speeds improve in emerging and developing countries. This will be a very good thing for our global society. The current bandwidth bottle necks serve as both a barrier and an opportunity for companies like ours. With that said, our technical advantage is only one aspect of our business. Our value to the ISPs not only comes from our customized technology platform but also from our media products and services like www.SportPass.TV that make ISP data plans more attractive to consumers. Ultimately the ISP business will have to adapt as well to become more media service friendly and we want to be there to grow with our customers. To touch upon the bandwidth issue a little more, while new technology is being developed and more bandwidth is being created in India, we believe it will be some time before the overall Indian broadband infrastructure will be able to handle a fully open and high quality streaming architecture. Even in markets like the United States, where broadband penetration is very high, bandwidth scarcity is a major concern as more and more people go online to watch video at higher and higher qualities.

How is content for sportpass.tv and filmpass.tv selected- human selection or through pre selection criteria?

Content on www.SportPass.TV is programmed by both humans and computers. For freemium content, we have developed an algorithm that finds the most popular and relevant content for a target market within a given content category. For premium content, we have a team of talented executives that acquire and program content for www.SportPass.TV

In both cases, human oversight, quality assurance and editorial is key to our success. While it is tempting to let the computers do all the work, we still see value in hiring humans to entertain humans!