What’s the biggest bother of watching YouTube on mobile phones? Jerky videos. This is where Pune-born, San Francisco Bay Area-based Nickhil Jakatdar comes in.

In July 2008, he co-founded Vuclip. When Airtel aired its “Re. 1 mobile videos only” ad in 2013, Vuclip became popular (the two are strategic partners). The company known for mobile video streaming solutions today has over three million subscribers per quarter across six countries.

Here’s what the 42-year-old Nickhil –– also a tech entrepreneur who has made around $400 million from supporting and selling companies –– has to say about Vuclip.

At a time when online video means YouTube, how would you define Vuclip?

Vuclip is the leading premium mobile video on demand service for emerging markets with more than three million subscribers per quarter across six countries. Through strategic partnerships with more than 160 top studios around the world, Vuclip brings to subscribers blockbuster Hollywood and regional movies, TV shows and music videos in 20 different languages. Vuclip’s Dynamic Adaptive Transcoding provides an amazing unbuffered viewing experience to consumers across all mobile devices and on any network. In short, Vuclip is more like Netflix or Hulu rather than YouTube.

We now have 4G. What happens to your content delivery mode, that is, reducing video resolution according to network-and device-related limitations?

Even with the introduction of 4G, the problem of buffering is not going to go away. Increasingly today, consumers are adopting smartphones with higher resolution screens and they want to view HD-quality videos. Sure, bigger pipes are being built, but those are already being filled with more data. A report by Citrix in the US earlier this year shows that even in a developed market like the US, consumers experience 15 seconds of buffering for every minute of video played on the 4G LTE network.

While networks will get better, so will the quality and resolution of the smartphones, from 720p to 1080p to HD and 4K. Add to this the fact that we still have a huge number of consumers still to get on to data, the sheer volume of data is growing several orders of magnitude faster than the pace of investments and growth in infrastructure. This creates a much more acute challenge for operators, consumers and everyone in the mobile ecosystem.

What about original content?

Netflix has already proved this can work with House Of Cards. We believe there is a similar opportunity on the mobile platform as well. Stay tuned for more updates from us on that front.

There is an option to download videos. Doesn’t that go against copyright issues?

On the Vuclip Android and Java Apps, we have the ‘offline viewing’ feature which offers the convenience of watching users’ favourite videos offline. Even when the content is taken offline, it can only be viewed using their Vuclip App and we therefore have the ability to track those offline views. We licence this content from more than 160 content providers.

Tell our readers about yourself...

I was born and raised in Pune and travelled to the USA for my masters degree and PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley and while working on my PhD, I founded my first start-up, Timbre Technologies, which was eventually acquired for $138 million. I was granted 46 patents while at Timbre Technologies; more than 50 per cent of all semiconductor chips used in personal computers, tablets and mobile devices use one or more of the three technologies I developed. I went on to establish or lead two other companies, Praesagus and CommandCAD that also had very good acquisitions.

I co-founded Vuclip in 2008 to make quality mobile video accessible to anyone in any country on any type of device. In addition to starting four companies, I have also invested in 40-or-so start-ups in Silicon Valley, China and India across various areas from mobile gaming to online education to high-volume manufacturing to computer vision.

I once entertained the idea of starting a career in golf. That path never materialised, but I still enjoy playing golf. Patience is a virtue and that is something that doesn’t come naturally to me! I am also a poker enthusiast and relish every opportunity to compete, whether at our own internal team tournaments or at the Poker World Series in 2011. Finally, I am an avid soccer player.

Fact file
Name: Nickhil Jakatdar
Age: 42
Education: Pune University, University of Berkeley
The break: His first company Timber Technologies, which worked towards developing and marketing solutions for semiconductors, was sold for $138 million in 2001
At the moment: CEO of Vuclip
Fan of: House Of Cards, English Premier League

Nickhil’s fave 5 views on Vuclip
• Making of Salman Khan’s Kick
• Biography: Lionel Messi
• Top 10 Marvel Movies
• Comedy Nights with Kapil
• Hidden Camera Pranks: The Alien Invaders