Bollywood Goes Broadband: BODVOD Co-Founder Vinod Bhat Eyes South Asia’s Potential in VOD and Beyond
Will brands eventually veer from crawling to walking when it comes to VOD-related advertising?
We think we can really accelerate the means by which brands can reach out this audience. Because of the super-distribution that we have available to us, and because we also have presence online with Google Video, GUBA, The Venice Project and a couple of other companies out there, and on top of that, with our own mobile store that we had developed and soon will launch, we give brands multiple touch points by which they can these South Asian consumers by pretty much dealing with us in one conversation and reaching the entire country.
With Bollywood on-demand, you’ve said the demographics are blurred. How about audiences beyond the South Asian market?
Based on the purchase patterns we’ve seen there are a lot of other groups interested in Bollywood content. That’s people from the Middle East, so a lot of Arabs in this country today, a lot of people from Southeast Asia—Indonesians and Malaysians—people from different parts of Eastern Europe, and people from continental Africa—native Kenyans, native South Africans and North Africans including Morocco and Egypt. So that’s the second kind of audience we’ve seen.
The tertiary audience really comes from general market individuals that tend to be urban, more educated and just interested in looking at and consuming Bollywood content. What’s happened in the past is anytime people from this tertiary group hear about Bollywood content or have any kind of interest, for them to try and go find out is very tough. They don’t know where these theaters are, they don’t know where these DVDs are, and they’re certainly not going to subscribe to a South Asian channel that might be on DirecTV or EchoStar because they don’t like it that much to make that kind of investment. So to be able to purchase on an a la carte basis is a lot more tenable to them.
So, we see the total market in terms of people in the US that are interested in Bollywood content to be about 25 million people. It’s a good-sized market for us, and I think that’s really an exception for a category of foreign film. When you look at other countries that have film industries, China or different countries in South America or in different parts of Europe, you don’t really see anything that’s to the level of being a juggernaut like India is—putting over 1,000 films out a year and having such a tremendous following of people across different countries.
Video is on the top of everyone’s mind in the digital space, so it seems like the right time to penetrate the market.
It’s really about efficient markets. There is a real imbalance in supply and demand. There are a lot of people that are very enthusiastic about this type of content, but the supply is just not there. I think the supply wasn’t there because a lot of the media companies didn’t have the technology in place, or Internet services weren’t necessarily widely adopted in use for video just yet. They certainly still have some growth to go, but now you have in place things like video-on-demand, a robust category that cable operators support, and services like Google Video, iTunes, Movielink and things of that nature. Now, you have an outlet for that demand to be quenched by supply going through all these various partners that we have.
What is the overall BODVOD strategy in ‘07?
In addition to cutting deals with the cable operators and other services, we really go out of our way to help them with marketing. The way that we do that is by setting up certain meetings, and just conveying them that we can do standard media buying, so we can go to our media outlets and market our brand and do it across the Web, print, radio and television and really put the partner’s brand at the forefront. It’s really helping that particular partner develop a relationship with the South Asian audience. There’s also a lot of grassroots operation, where we get street teams and other sponsorships at various festivals and events to really get into the nuts & bolts of the community.
Then, we’ll also do a lot of press, where we’ll not only go to the South Asian press, we’ll go to those same markets where there’s a lot of South Asian people living in that particular DMA, and talk to the New York Times, the LA Times or the Houston Chronicle just to drive more transaction. Now that we’ve got the distribution in place, it’s really about going back and helping these same people to make sure that the content is properly marketed and merchandised.
Part of the grand plan, too, is build out all of the online and the mobile, but we think having our own consumer brand, too, is very much a part of the big picture. That’s where the brand name SAAVN comes in.
What’s the concept behind SAAVN?
SAAVN is a Web 2.0 community for enthusiasts of Bollywood and other South Asian content. The short-end way to express that is it’s kind of like a MySpace or a Friendster, but meant for people that are into Bollywood content. But i think the big differentiator is that we actually control the rights to over 300 movies, over 200,000 audio tracks, 10,000 music videos and 3,000 ringtones. When you have that mass of content, you can do some really interesting things.
The old-line approach to getting content on the Web would be like just set up a store, let people download movies, stream television content or watch music videos and have something that’s effectively the equivalent of going to the store and purchasing content. We don’t think that’s so compelling because there’s subsidy out there for doing that. So we took the approach of developing a community first, where people could go and log in, share more about themselves, where they’re from, when they were born, etc., but really emphasize their media tastes.
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