Mobile Entertainment Market Is Set To Explode

Uday Sodhi
CEO, New Media, Balaji Telefilms

Uday Sondhi has been working in the Internet and Mobile space for the last 9 years. He served as COO at Net4India, one of India's largest Web Hosting companies and had worked with rediff.com as Senior Vice President - Interactive services. He's currently the CEO, New Media at Balaji Telefilms. Tajdar Ahmad Khan of BestMediaInfo.com spoke to him on various issues:

Q) How is Balaji Telefilms doing in new media space?

Balaji Telefilms is a leading content creation company spanning across various media. Within the group we produce content for Films, Television and now for New Media, i.e., Mobile Devices and Internet. The New Media team's effort is to create entertainment products designed for the Mobile Devices and Internet.

Q) How has digital market in India changed over the decade?

There has been a huge shift in the content available for the online users. The internet from being text heavy is now becoming video centric. Video is one of the fastest growing segments on the internet. Almost half of the Indian online population watches at least 1 online video per month. Almost 14 - 15 hours of video are uploaded on the net worldwide everyday! This presents a huge opportunity to creative production houses like Balaji Telefilms to provide the fast growing Internet Audiences with quality content online.

The same is the case with Mobile. With new devices, huge cheap storage and 3G bandwidth are on their way, the mobile entertainment market is set to explode. Worldwide Mobile Entertainment is supposed to be a $64 billion (Rs.3,00,000 crore) market in 2012.

Q) For the first time, in last six years, Indian media industry has shown a negative growth rate. How will this actually restrict the growth of digital media in India?

A slowdown is normally a good time to start and build a business. We hope to be able to use this period to build the platforms, relationships and content needed to build a long term sustainable business.

Q) What's the total share of revenue that Balaji communications earns from various forms of digital marketing?

This can vary from content to content and across partners. We are also planning to launch a website soon.

Q) Now, when most of the media houses are going online for premiering there of the programs, what plans does Balaji TeleFilms have for its program promotion?

As the online consumer base in India grows more and more media will be premiered online and created especially for online audiences. Online audiences provide immediate feedback and response to the content creators and therefore helping the creative process.

Q) Rapid growth of telecommunication in past few years has certainly opened new avenues for digital marketing. Do you think that soon mobile marketing will take over all the existing forms of new media?

Mobile marketing is currently a small part of the digital marketing pie. As devices improve and 3G comes in, we believe more money will shift to marketing spends on digital media. The Internet and Mobile which are currently 2-3% of media spends will move and take a larger share of overall media spends.

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