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Sravanthi Challapalli

Chennai, Oct. 1 Playing Cupid is getting more hi-tech, with online matrimonial enterprises Shaadi.com and Bharat Matrimony each tying up with DTH and mobile services providers in the last couple of months. Shaadi.com has tied up with Dish TV and Vodafone and Bharat Matrimony with Tata Sky and Airtel.

While there are only around 40 million Internet users in India, the number of mobile services users and DTH subscribers is estimated at 300 million and 14 million respectively, and growing. To extend the reach of their businesses, which are in the online and offline space, these digital platforms are the obvious choices, say these companies.

“There are many challenges to using the Internet. Many still use a dial-up connection, for instance. The ease of use on the mobile is wonderful. Our tie-up with Vodafone took off in August and already the service has been accessed around five million times,” says Mr Vibhas Mehta, Business Head, Shaadi.com. The facility is available through an interactive voice service, SMS and WAP too. The voice and SMS services are being used aggressively, he adds.

On both the DTH and mobile platforms, there’s a menu to choose from, profiles of prospective brides and grooms, facility to leave a message and “patch” a call to a person one is interested in, without the phone numbers being revealed. The costs incurred by the user, including the money paid as registration fees or fees per contact provided, are shared as revenue by the matrimonial service and its partner service provider.

For instance, the Bharat Matrimony-Airtel tie-up charges a subscription fee of Rs 20 per week where users can view any number of profiles and get two contacts free of cost, but will have to pay Rs 10 per every contact over and above that.

On Tata Sky, each SMS request for contact details of a prospective partner costs Rs 10. Every week, 1,000 new profiles are uploaded onto Actve Matrimony, the Tata Sky-Bharat Matrimony service.

Mr Murugavel Janakiraman, founder and CEO, Bharat Matrimony.com, says the tie-up with Tata Sky will give the company direct access to over two million homes in addition to its existing base of over 12 million members. Airtel’s subscriber base of 77 million (with about 10 million subscribers using its GPRS services) made it the partner of choice on the mobile platform. In the case of Dish TV, the subscriber base affords Shaadi.com access to 3.6 million homes, says Mr Mehta.

Wouldn’t it be cumbersome to use the services on a mobile? Mr Mehta says his company has recreated the service for the mobile phone, and that the “100 per cent matchmaking process can be carried out on it”. “Our mobile service has been designed to integrate seamlessly with that on the Net, and users don’t have to re-register to access it,” says Mr Janakiraman. For the mobile and DTH service providers too, it’s an opportunity to differentiate themselves and grow their subscriber base. In a press release, Mr Vikram Mehra, Chief Marketing Officer, Tata Sky, was quoted as saying, “We believe that Active Matrimony will help us further grow our 2.3 million connection base.”

Mr Mehta said the mobile facility from Shaadi.com, now available only on Vodafone, will be available on other service providers by the end of the year.

Mr Janakiraman of Bharat Matrimony says that as Internet penetration is not very high in Tier 2 and 3 towns, much of India is poised to experience Internet applications in a miniature form on the mobile. “They will get comfortable with this, or they may be motivated to go online,” he predicts.

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