Now-a-days online streaming of user generated video is no big deal. The real trouble lies in delivering the videos to different platforms and this is what has become a viable business opportunity for some high profile content generators.
Video on Demand simply means accessing video content on your choice of platform be it your TV, PC, Mobile or Gaming consoles at your demand. This could be channeled through internet or dedicated equipments like boxee. Video on Demand also include interactive channel broadcasting platforms like DTH.
User content generators like Youtube are clearly focusing on this segment to rake in high profitability in future. For e.g if youtube were to launch a 24 hour DTH channel in India with compelling pricing, Don’t you think they can find millions of subscriber with a channel run from free UGC?
So to further explain Video on demand I would give an example of Mobile VAS service. People send a Rs. 3 msg just to get phone number of a shop or business whereas they could have got the same content on the net for free so this explains how a convenient proposition could be turned into a perfect business opportunity.
Movie on Demand is thus akin to video on demand as it just includes the circulation of legitimized movie content.It is already being used by millions of Indian through platforms like DTH.
Netflix recently signed a much protested deal with warner bros. which delays the launch of movies released on its video rental service.The deal was aimed at garnering greater video on demand rights for warner’s repository as movies on demand business in U.S alone will reach $ 2.4 billion by 2013.
The Netflix deal will soon put the Indian Movie rental services like Seventymm and BigFlix into similar orbit.This is because in recent times these services had to hike their subscription rates due to increase in transportation costs related to delivering of movie titles at subscribers door step.
Movie rental services like Bigflix have started to allow downloading of movies off lately but they clearly lack the movie on demand approach in their business.
So in future if these companies have to sustain their growth and cut costs they will have to adapt movies on demand in a big manner. The adoption will surely come in play by collaborating with broadband, DTH and Mobile players in India.
What do you think – Will the launch of Movie-on-Demand increase offtake for video rental services in India?
I think you are looking at the opportunity upside down. Any kind of VoD service demands a large segment of customer having access to a fairly large network pipe. Neither Internet nor Mobile broadband in India provide that.
the only remaining option is television – a medium that is dominated by copyrighted long-form content. for someone with UGC ensuring both those adjectives to be fulfilled remains distant in India.
More importantly DTH services, cable networks and production houses are deeply enmeshed in the whole ecosystem. None of them can tear away without hurting themselves significantly.
Compare this against Hulu, where the reason cables cannot really stop ABCs and NBCs is because the pipe is Internet.
I agree with ur points but in India things starts to slow down when it comes to dependability on internet.
Indian broadband operators does have the required network pipe in place to facilitate such humongous transfer of data as many users illegitimately transfer gigs of data through dc(p2p on broadband infrastructure).Further if IPTV could be facilitated in India so does Movie on demand.
For mobile operators it would be bandwidth based service only but with NTT Docomo offering dirt cheap GPRS pricing in market(just .50paise/mb compared to Rs.10/mb on other networks) we can get hint of cheaper 3G regime in future to facilitate such services.
Hulu is a case in point but I didn’t include it in post as such success in Indian market will take longer time to materialize due to slower internet speeds.