The Constant Observer

Rajat Barjatiya, the brother of Sooraj Barjatiya has launched what is arguably India’s first mobile TV Soap.

“I hate to use the term first. I would rather say that we are among the first to make a serious attempt at doing this. We have produced a 90 episode series, with three minutes per episode, and it is in the humour genre,” Rajat said.

Quite clearly the trend is moving towards TV 'munching' as we have repeatedly stressed here on The Constant Observer

The series will be launched under the Rajshri Media Banner.

Mobile users in India are estimated at 291 Million according to latest reports and the number of users using the Internet from their Mobile phones is now 38 Million.

In my post on the Future of Mobile VAS in India, I spoke about the distributors, creators of content, and aggregators of content – those who modify content for phones and ipods. Rajshri Media is quite clearly a creator and aggregator combined. Such companies can become potent forces especially if they capitalize on early advantages.

Its not quite clear if Rajshri looks to charge users for these TV shows and it remains to be seen how they will make revenues.

I seriously doubt that users will access this mobile show on their mobiles. This statement keeping 2 things in mind:

-       High Download Costs

-       Low Download Speeds

As of now, for an average GSM user who does not have unlimited GPRS, it costs Rs. 10 per 10 kb. Add to that the cost of making a call. Even if the serial is free, it may cost a user about Rs. 50 to download one episode. Why would anyone spend so much time, effort and money to watch a soap? For consumers with ‘unlimited plans’, the speeds are too low and they too need to make local calls to connect via GPRS – here too the costs may be about Rs. 20 per download. 

One alternative is to sell the TV shows through the Rajshri portal and then allow users to transfer these shows to their phones or ipods to watch on the go. This defeats the purpose as the beauty with this series would be in the instancy of the distribution platform which as of now is hardly ‘instant’. Further, what stops users from viewing the series on their computers itself?

I have spoken about the problems with VAS in India in detail here.

Infrastructure to provide high speed internet over mobile phones still remains a problem which will have to be solved soon in order to maximize the capabilities of mobile Internet. A lot of phones are now available with Wi – Fi capabilities. In the future one may see 802.16 Wi Max enabled phones as well. That’s where the real action is going to be. High speed low cost internet over mobiles.  A few weeks back, a premier operator (Vodafone) experienced a failure of its voice services. Click here to read more on that.  If the infrastructure problem is not solved, and if there is no reinvestment into latest technologies by telecom operators, one can try and optimize the use experience and the prize of handsets as much as possible – the real fruits of internet over mobile can be enjoyed only with an infrastructure.