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Vuclip Studios is ramping up original content production to about 10 hours a month, building on a maiden effort in India earlier this year with online series What the Duck.
A second season has been commissioned from a local production house in India and three or four new shows are in development right now.
Founder and chief executive, Nickhil Jakatdar, says the success of the cricket-based comedy show What the Duck has been encouraging.
“We wanted to see whether we had the capability to produce,” he says of the move into originals.
Part of the effort to create its own intellectual property is using data insights to keep risk and costs low.
How low? Low. Jakatdar says online video budgets are way lower than television budgets, perhaps by a factor of 10.
The production initiative is built on data-based insights gleaned from the thousands of hours of third-party content that video delivery platform Vuclip – now majority owned by Hong Kong’s PCCW Media – is already streaming, says Jakatdar.
Vuclip Studios was established eight and a half years ago after Jakatdar and a few of his best tech friends came up with a “problem statement” – “How do you provide the best possible mobile video experience for consumers for emerging markets?” – and started figuring out possible answers.
Today, Jakatdar leaps nimbly over the holes currently being poked in Asia’s OTT growth story because of challenges such as under-developed broadband/network infrastructure and consumers ability to pay for streaming video.
By now, his compression solutions (the official description is “dynamic adaptive transcoding technology”) and micro-transaction savvy have been proven.
Vuclip has 10 million paying subscribers and 270+ content partners across Asia and the Middle East. Users in Malaysia and Indonesia are watching between 300 and 400 minutes of video on their smartphones a month. And new markets are being added at a rate of one a month.
Vuclip runs PCCW’s Viu services in emerging markets such as Malaysia and Indonesia, where Viu launched at the end ...
Vuclip Studios is ramping up original content production to about 10 hours a month, building on a maiden effort in India earlier this year with online series What the Duck.
A second season has been commissioned from a local production house in India and three or four new shows are in development right now.
Founder and chief executive, Nickhil Jakatdar, says the success of the cricket-based comedy show What the Duck has been encouraging.
“We wanted to see whether we had the capability to produce,” he says of the move into originals.
Part of the effort to create its own intellectual property is using data insights to keep risk and costs low.
How low? Low. Jakatdar says online video budgets are way lower than television budgets, perhaps by a factor of 10.
The production initiative is built on data-based insights gleaned from the thousands of hours of third-party content that video delivery platform Vuclip – now majority owned by Hong Kong’s PCCW Media – is already streaming, says Jakatdar.
Vuclip Studios was established eight and a half years ago after Jakatdar and a few of his best tech friends came up with a “problem statement” – “How do you provide the best possible mobile video experience for consumers for emerging markets?” – and started figuring out possible answers.
Today, Jakatdar leaps nimbly over the holes currently being poked in Asia’s OTT growth story because of challenges such as under-developed broadband/network infrastructure and consumers ability to pay for streaming video.
By now, his compression solutions (the official description is “dynamic adaptive transcoding technology”) and micro-transaction savvy have been proven.
Vuclip has 10 million paying subscribers and 270+ content partners across Asia and the Middle East. Users in Malaysia and Indonesia are watching between 300 and 400 minutes of video on their smartphones a month. And new markets are being added at a rate of one a month.
Vuclip runs PCCW’s Viu services in emerging markets such as Malaysia and Indonesia, where Viu launched at the end of May. Vuclip also offers video/content services to telcos across the region as either Vuclip-branded value-adds or as white label services.
PCCW Media operates Viu in markets with high-speed broadband/mobile and high smartphone penetration, such as Singapore and Hong Kong.
At the same time as eyeing the enormous potential, Jakatdar is open about the end game: an environment in which Vuclip, with all its promises of “an elegant, unbuffered user experience regardless of device or network” to lower-end users, is no longer necessary.
Over time, as consumers in developing markets grow comfortable with apps, they will migrate from Vuclip to Viu, he says.
The migration could be a decade away. Meanwhile, emerging markets with mobile data newbies and starter smartphones remain Vuclip’s sweet spot.
“The reason Vuclip will still be valid over five to seven years is because the penetration of data in these markets is low,” Jakatdar says. Today 20% of people in emerging markets use mobile data. “Between 70% and 80% have no clue what data even means,” he says.
Things will change – slowly. “They will get into data, but they will start with something simple. Data is still not affordable for them, and affordability will not go through the roof in five years. It will take time,” he adds.
Vuclip’s challenges are the same as everyone else’s, including how much to charge (answer: micro sums, five or 10 cents rather than five or seven dollars), how to bill (answer: carrier billing), keeping users coming back, making the combo free/paid model work,
For now and maybe the next 10 years, the winds will be behind Vuclip’s back. “There is still,” he says, “a lot of penetration to be had”.
Published on 13 June 2016