The Hindu Business Line : Movies at a click and press

One-year-old entertainment portal Rajshri.com should have enough reasons to celebrate. And yet the man behind the portal, Rajjat A. Barjatya, Managing Director, Rajshri Media, says they got more things wrong than right.

“We have been very satisfied by the response of the consumer, the content owners, advertiser and the media. Although it was only our first few steps, and we made more mistakes than what we did right, the important thing is that we learnt from those mistakes,” says Barjatya.

When you have got a lot of it right and know where you are headed, you probably can afford such candour. An enhanced version of Rajshri.com should be ready in about 8-12 weeks. The company is investing “significantly” in both user interface as well as back-end technology. The new face with many new promised features will come supported by a new technology platform developed partly in-house. Starting with a 50 terabyte strength and having increased that to 120 terabytes, Rajshri is increasing server capacity to a 1000 terabytes in the next one-and-a-half years.

Barjatya has also kept his word of developing exclusive new content for the Internet and mobile. In four-six weeks, a first — made-exclusively-for-download serial — will be premiered.

The 90-episode serial consists of three-minute short, “wonderful stories of wit and wisdom”, says Barjatya. He’s also betting on a happy mobile audience for the humorous capsules; talks are on with mobile service providers for downloads of the same.

The portal, which has Bollywood hits such as Rang De Basanti and Life in a Metro, has also enhanced its portfolio during the year to include episodes of current affair shows like NDTV’s Big Fight and snippets of entertainment from other television broadcasters. Old serials such as Zee’s Astitva, as well as songs and scenes from Rajshri’s own collection of classic, clean, Rajshri-style romances seem to work well for the portal. It has over 6,000 hours of content including the Mahabharata serial. It does not buy the content but has a revenue-sharing model with content owners.

A good part (about 88 per cent) of the portal’s audience is international, predictably a non-resident Indian viewer. The portal, which was established to cater to 25 million global Indians, has the largest market in North America, followed by the UK and West Europe. And then come India and West Asia.

The Indian interest, consisting of about 12-18 per cent, however, has come as a pleasant surprise for the makers of the portal. At the time of launch, Rajshri.com had not even considered an Indian audience allowing for billings only in dollars; business-wise they still rarely add a dollar to the portal’s cash register. The Web site sees more than 1.75 million unique visitors per month, with traffic growing at 18 per cent.

The constraints to Web 2.0 profitability continue to be a concern, says Barjatya, mentioning the most cited point about low PC penetration in India. Although access is growing through enterprises and cyber cafes, one is hardly likely to download three-hour movies there. Poor broadband connectivity is another worry, a dial-up will just not do for rich content.

The third factor, says Barajatya is lack of consumer education on the merits of legal online options. Awareness is extremely low, he says, speaking not just for his own portal but even for online video sharing sites like You Tube. Even content owners aren’t completely convinced about the merits of an online distribution platform.

“Content owners are still only experimenting with online distribution,” stressing that it’s only an experiment. Yet title owners like Shemaroo will have four online releases on the portal, and is likely to bring another ten titles soon; UTV will have another ten. That a download is not at the cost of a DVD sale, and additionally brings in a large number of viewers, is gaining strength, says Barjatya.

The Rajshris, who launched the portal with a simultaneous online launch of their last home production, Vivah, are hoping for more day-and-date, or a close to day-and-date online releases of movies. The Shahid Kapoor-Amrita Rao starrer directed by Barjatya’s brother has had 6,500 downloads at a rate of $9.99, which works out to an online revenue of more than Rs 25 lakh for the movie alone.

The business has grabbed investor interest, and Barjatya has had talks with several venture capitalists and private equity players. Estimates put the Indian industry at $12 billion and predict a CAGR of 18 per cent. Indian content sold outside India has been estimated at $200 million, according to a Ernst & Young-FICCI report.

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