It was a suburban train regular — two people fighting over a seat. Most people looked away, but Rajesh Londhe, a 30-year-old television producer in Mumbai, decided to record it on his mobile phone.
He was on cloud nine when visitors to the site MeraVideo.Com viewed his clip some 7,000 times. “I think that was a real high. Had I posted it on YouTube or some other international site, I don’t think my video would have lasted on the homepage even for a few minutes,” he says. According to one estimate, more than 100 million clips are viewed daily on YouTube, described by TIME magazine as the invention of 2006.
Scores of Indian start-ups aping the YouTube concept have set up shop over the last few months in various parts of the country. Some are not even a month old. These are platforms for Internet users to share all kinds of clips — from music and news to private parties and the longest kiss in Bollywood. And the people behind the desi websites take pride in the fact that YouTube was once a nondescript site. Then Google acquired it for $1.65 billion late last year.
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| PICTURE THIS: Screen shots of Indian video-sharing sites |
Among the Indian sites are AapkaVideo.Com, MeraVideo.Com, Dekhona.Com and Suckoobai.Com. Of course, YouTube continues to rule across the world, but the desi sites hope to attract Indian eyeballs. “If you try and search for an Indian video on YouTube, it will take you ages. But if you come to our site, you will realise that you will find something like a cricket video in no time at all. People are realising that,” says Naveen Athresh, co-founder and project manager of Bangalore-based AapkaVideo.Com.
“We provide the unique desi twist. The probability of getting featured here is far more than on, say, YouTube. At the end of the day every individual needs recognition in one’s own motherland,” says Kanwaldeep S. Kalsi, founder, MeraVideo.Com.
Some would dismiss them as mere clones of successful websites. “Well, the simple answer to that is Baazee.Com was a me-too eBay, but eventually got bought over by eBay. JobsAhead was similar to Monster and the obvious buyout happened. So there is no shame in being a copy as long as people can recognise that we can do as well as or better than the established video-sharing sites,” says Kalsi.
Video sharing is yet to take off in a big way in the country and that is one of the problems these start-ups face. Another problem is the fact that broadband penetration is low in India. There is no advertising, and the publicity they get is mostly through word of mouth.
Still, the sites teem with videos posted by users sourced from other sites. These include clips from Bollywood, funny advertisements or segments of popular TV shows. There are videos of people singing, or playing the piano, and a great number of spoofs. A take-off on the Abhishek Bachchan-Aishwarya Rai wedding, for instance, has been a great hit.
“We Indians are not great video guys. Youngsters these days shoot on their mobiles, but most of it is not all that interesting, and the only ones that catch the eyeballs are those that have a sexual element in them,” says Athresh.
Sex, clearly, sells. Under the “Most Viewed” section are video clips of a Delhi college couple having sex in a car, and a two-minute clip of a Chandigarh girl undressing.
“You might find some explicit videos but you will not find nudity,” claims Kalsi. AapkaVideo claims that they have a robust system in place and they remove any video that is reported as offensive. But one can still find sexually explicit videos on AapkaVideo.
According to IT experts, these sites still have a long way to go, for money is yet to pour in. To survive, some of these may settle for paid advertisements within uploaded videos, or go for subscription-based services for exclusive content.
“Revenue models for video sites will be difficult to crack; that’s owing to the sites being essentially about entertainment. It’s not easy to get people to pay up money on the web for direct entertainment sources,” says Amit Ranjan, the co-founder and COO of SlideShare. He also runs a tech blog, Webyantra, that profiles Indian web products and services.
Innovation is what desi clones are now trying their hand at. While some have come out with mobile phone websites offering free download of videos, others offer incentives to people posting original videos. For instance, Dekhona and AapkaVideo offer iPods for the most-viewed videos. Moves are afoot for tie-ups with local content providers.
And there are others such as India Interacts.com and Nautanki.TV that seek to make a mark by combining the traditional with the latest. While Chennai-based IndiaInteracts calls itself a “news views” site that has text and video content produced by professionals, semi-professionals and amateurs (video forms around 30 per cent of the total content on the site), Mumbai-based Nautanki.TV has exclusive video content which again is done by people from various walks of life.
Currently both the sites are free for everyone, but will eventually move to a paid service with premium content being available to subscribers.
“Online ads are to touch Rs 750 crore in India by 2010 and video ads would start taking a good portion of this. Peer-to-peer selling and renting of content could be a good model for revenue in future,” says Subbu Murugan, head, IndiaInteracts.
The me-too YouTubes are new kids on the block, so nobody is making money yet. The heads don’t know when they will break even, but are optimistically hiring people. AapkaVideo has around 15 employees, MeraVideo, 12, and Nautanki.TV, 20.
Meanwhile, desi video-sharing sites are propping up enticing taglines to woo viewers. “Director Ban Jao,” “Watch...Share...Earn!” “Light. Camera, You” and “Desi Broadcast…Desi Fun,” are some of the slogans. But to survive, they have to look beyond the written word.