India as a market has room only for two-three mobile video-on-demand services even as these offerings are becoming a hyper-competitive segment in the country, according to California-headquartered Vuclip.
“In India, there is room only for 2-3 video companies, not 20-30. At last count there were some 20-25 players offering video on demand services in here,” Vuclip Founder and CEO Nickhil Jakatdar told The Hindu .
The industry will definitely see consolidation over the next two years. “Video is the future and India is a big market. Companies enter the market assuming that they will make revenues. They shell out huge license fee for content but that money is not recovered as there are not as many users.”
20 million free user baseVuclip, which started its operation about eight years ago, has free user base of 20 million in India, contributing 10 per cent to their revenue and subscription-based user base of about five million people. It faces competition from newer platforms such as Hotstar and Spool which are advertising heavily.
“They have done a good job in marketing…the approach we have taken is fine tuning of the product before going big on marketing. But soon, in a few months time, you will see a different Vuclip brand,” Jakatdar said. With the backing of Hong-Kong-based conglomerate PCCW, the company “can push the pedal which you will be seeing with big new launch in the coming months,” he said. Earlier his year, PCCW’s media arm bought a majority stake in Vuclip.
80,000 hours of contentVuclip, which has around 80,000 hours of content on its platform, is presently seeing consumption of 100-150MB per user per month, a huge jump from 5-10 MB per user a month when it started.
