Yahoo! India is betting big on video. The vertical has tied up with 35 premium content partners, including the likes of Vidhu Vinod Chopra productions, to stream video on its website. Although the service is now offered free, future plans include on-demand video and even live streaming of premium events.
In a telephonic interview with The Hindu , Nitin Mathur, senior director and head of marketing for Yahoo! South East Asia and India, said unlike other video services Yahoo! Video was not for user-generated content. Instead the focus is to provide premium content producers a safe, copyrights violation-free environment to showcase their content.
Video consumption seems to have hit all the high notes in India of late. According to a recent FICCI-KPMG report on Media and Entertainment in India, the country saw a growth of 21 per cent in unique viewers across video sites locally from 2010 to 2011. Users in India spent 7.6 hours per user per month watching videos online in 2011 compared to 4.8 hours per viewer per month in 2010. Another report by research agency ComScore on “Rise of online video in India” said online video was growing at a tremendous pace with over 30 million Internet users consuming online video regularly, leading to over 1.8 Billion video streams every month.
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Nitin said Yahoo! India Video's primary ambition was to set up a reliable alternative source of distribution for content developers in the country. The era when film studios and television producers viewed the Web as detrimental to business was over. At the moment though, Yahoo! has kept all the videos free of cost.
The site is curated by a team of editors to ensure that only the most relevant videos are showcased. The site employs the variable-bit rate technology that ensures better streaming for users by taking into account their connectivity.