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. 

I have recently written quite a bit about Facebook’s takeover by Microsoft, Facebook itself, and Social Networking as a whole.

 

 

Microsoft gives me more reason to write about them. A few days back they purchased WebFives, a Seattle based, Mobile focused, Social Networking Site for an amount that has not been disclosed to the media.

 

(I think the amount has not been disclosed because its simply not newsworthy enough – I doubt its anywhere close to Microsoft’s minority stake in Facebook!)

 

 

One also needs to note that Microsoft has not made a ‘community buy’ (‘buying’ the users who are already a part of the social network); it has only acquired the technology of WebFives. WebFives is thus slated to stop at the end of this year and their users will not migrate to wherever Microsoft take WebFives.

 

 

Part of the reason why Microsoft may have only considered a technology buyout is that webfives.com probably has as many visitors as my personal blog (actually maybe a few more but what the hell I like to feel good about myself!) according to site analytics at compete.com.

 

 

So it’s quite clear that Microsoft is going to do nothing with the WebFives brand – it will probably fade into oblivion.

 

 

I think theres a bigger reason why Microsoft acquired only the technologies of WebFives.

 

 

If one looks at it, WebFives offers all the standard Social 2.0 services such as blogging, photoshare, videoshare, slideshare, audioshare – the works. The biggest asset of WebFives however is the fact that it has a facility where content (photos, videos, audio) can be uploaded directly from the mobile phones of users.

 

 

Users who sign up for WebFives generally have an account like www.webfives.com/user (much like blogger etc). What they also have is a WAP account. WAP or Wireless Application Protocol is an open international standard for applications that use wireless communication. Its principal application is to enable access to the Internet from a mobile phone or PDA.

 

 

So essentially this indicates that Social Networking is soon going to be shared between the PC and the mobile platform. I think Microsoft may just be catching the right trend this time round because as an observer I have noticed that people like to check their social networks anytime they get an opportunity to!

 

 

One also needs to know that the quantity of conversations on social networks is steadily increasing and that is feeding the ‘I need to check my account’ mindset.

 

 

WAP has its flaws. Also, gadgets like the iPhone that make the internet surfing experience on phones great (because they have successfully been able to migrate computer based web browsers like Mac’s Safari to the mobile format) prove to be worthy competitors. So im not sure how Microsoft will use the WAP format but they surely will use the learnings that WebFives has accumulated in creating a mobile page to help in optimizing all their content (Windows Live etc.) for mobile devices. This is mandatory as social 2.0 content for mobile phones needs to be fine-tuned and presented in a different way for optimization.

 

 

I also see, the technology of WebFives being integrated into Windows Live services to strengthen their already strong offering and make it more ‘engaging’ i.e. allow members to interact more easily (which is not Windows Live’s USP).

 

 

Another interesting point to note is that WebFives has widgets that can be embedded into social networks such as Facebook, Hi5, MySpace, and very soon, Orkut.

 

 

So its quite clear that Microsoft is trying to create bridge between user generated content and Social 2.0, which is smart. Think about it, how many people who blog, actively blog on Facebook or MySpace . So there’s a void here which can be filled using the technologies of WebFives. A bridge between the 2 pillars of Social 2.0 so to speak. Flickr has already followed a similar strategy on Facebook with much success.

 

 

With such a move I also see the services of Windows Live and Facebook getting more closely related. Actually not just Facebook – all the other social networking sites as well! It seems like Windows Live will now be deeply integrated into social networks.

 

 

 

WebFives, unlike Facebook, is probably a low key investment for Microsoft, but one that holds a lot of keys for its integration and future strategy development plans in order to optimize the returns generated by web 2.0 and social 2.0.