One evening in Versova

Oh! by the way we recently have taken up a 2200 sq ft office in Versova. It has a fantastic sea view and a kilometer of beach just across the road. A coffee shop, sizzler joint, a sea food shack and a Kerala cuisine restaurant. We plan to shift in the next one month (we are tired of playing musical chairs in the current office)

These pics were taken during the small celebration that the team put together at short notice.

The HR department has been requested to kindly ignore the kind of celebration and language used during the duration of the party. There were just two people who were not drunk - one of them was me and the other was a 16 month old baby.

for Pics click here

:)

nautanki.tv is now on facebook

nautanki.tv becomes the first Indian company to integrate an app with facebook.com. We already have 30 users in the last 30 minutes and some 400 + people have watched the content.

you can add the application to your facebook profile by clicking here

Congratulations to Ashish and Ram on this little step to creating history.

Cheers

nautanki.tv ver2.0 theta is live

Over the last month users have seen and felt the nautanki.tv system changing for the good. The look feel and backend has undergone changes to make nautanki.tv a platform. An ecosystem.

What does it mean for the nautanki.tv community?

1. Now content owners / tv channels can plug into the system and create their channels. Which means that existing content can be converted to suit the internet medium and tv channels can get their existing advertisers onto a vibrant medium. nautanki.tv thus becomes a platform for the TV channels to reach a huge audience.
2. Other platforms like social networking sites, blogging systems and such can open their links to nautanki.tv and create seamless integration which allows their users to get content which they want onto their blogs and profiles. We already have experimented with facebook.com and it has opened options for everyone to participate in the ecosystem.
2.1 We have become the first guys to integrate Google Adsense into video feeds. The results are pathetic but trust us we are learning and improving as we go along. The trickle of revenues will help the publishers too. And we are not tampering with Google TOS as a few friends feel. We have looked the the TOS carefully and are certain that Google or for that matter anyone who wants to reach our ecosystem will see what we are creating.
3. Advertisers have the benefit of economies of scale: more segment views per day means more ad inventory which means that we do not need to charge a lot to keep the ecosystem growing. We have rationalized our prices and now are comparable to what banner advertising costs in India. We have a new product offering that will be revealed soon.
4. The next three months will see significant improvement in throughputs on the earnings. The advertising community cannot sit back and refuse to acknowledge the numbers: 3 million segment views a day, 1 million unique IPs a day. 30 second video ads are far far better than banners that develop into a blind spot. We will continue to improve interfaces, players, provide the click to play / autoplay option and so on making it easier for you the publishers to take advantage of the ecosystem.
5. Our move into regional Indian languages has started with Saptarangi and we will bring more Indian languages in the coming months. Our first 30 minute fiction net show called Life and Times of Vyjanti has gone live this week. Content takes time to create and we now are ready for the drama.

We appreciate your comments and emails and brickbats, it makes us believe in what we are doing. We are creating history!

Stay Tunned!

hi folks

An update from the tech team.

As you aware we have moved the platform for nautanki.tv as of 11/9/07

the new platform takes us closer to television than before. Unlike earlier when shows were scheduled ever hour we now are like television with shows changing after each play. which means the viewers can now watch nautanki.tv like live tv. no waiting for the next content episode for an hour. shortly we are going to also get in longer programming with each episode with ads lasting 30 minutes and specials playing continuously till it ends.

we are now in a position to show you complete movies as and when the rights holders agree for screenings.

publishers, Content providers and advertiser data is being captured by the new system in improved ways.

publishers can now get separate feeds for separate pages on one site or different sites and track the usage across web properties. you can use this feature to optimize the location of the nautanki feed on the page etc etc.

a mail with the instructions for logging in into the new system will be sent later today.



we are in the process of migrating the data about your income/billing etc as i type this. this will show as a total in a single record with todays date. Due to incompatibility of the systems we cannot port data date wise but the older system will be kept available till the end of the month so that you can cross check your details (please do let us know in a mail to info[at]nautanki.tv if you see any errors.

The existing feeds will be disabled by the end of this month. so please do login and complete the process (details of which will be sent to you by mail) before that.

ram

houston we have a problem!

If you have reached the blog you would have noticed that we have changed while you were not looking. We are currently working on getting the feeds to the 1584 sites back in action. For sometime you will see "No Episode found on this channel" message.

The upgrade / redesign will give the nautanki.tv video media platform the much needed depth and technology strength to add languages and features that have been missing so far.

Please bear with us till our team ( Ram ) fixes the bugs.

Stay Tunned!


Update1: The feeds are back to normal. We will be experimenting on a few additional features as we go along. We expect everything to be back to normal within the next 48 hours. Please send us bugs and problems that you might face at info[at]nautanki[.]tv

Update2: existing users of publisher and content sections can log in to the admin section using the email addresses and the existing password. You will get a lot of additional features as we enable them over this week. In case any of you have a problem with your passwords please send your emails to ram[at]nautanki[.]tv

the nautanki.tv showreel

I bet not too many have seen the showreel of nautanki.tv. This showreel gives you the idea of the richness of the content that our team puts together. Most days we spend so much time thinking about the network we have and the problems that publishers face and the lack of advertisers willing to experiment with a new medium that we tend to forget that we are the original created for internet content creators! (thats a huge sentence) . Have fun and keep coming back for more!

WSJ AIA 2007 and nautanki.tv

WSJ - Wall Street Journal (yes the one that mr murdoch wants to buy)
AIA - Asia Innovation Awards
2007 - thats this year
nautanki.tv - a company innovative enough to be eligible to be invited for the WSJ AIA 2007.

Need I say more? No guarantees that we will win anything but then we are getting noticed by the majors.

nautanki.tv does not make the cut

We were informed yesterday that we did not make it to the RH Asia 100. Reason given was that we did not have a track record and were only 6 months into operations when we were nominated. It does seem we need to grow up as a business.

Thank you everyone for your support and emails and comments. Next year we promise.

Cheers

Sunil R Nair

Pirates of Shivaji Park

A dear friend of ours plans to do a story on nautanki.tv in a prominent magazine and the title that she has planned for the story is "Pirates of Shivaji Park"! For those of you who do not know what Shivaji Park means or are unaware of the cultural importance of this open ground in Central Mumbai - Shivaji Park is where major political parties hold their rallies and protests in Mumbai. Dr Ambedkar - the social reformer's birth and death anniversaries are celebrated at this location. It serves as the meeting place for hundreds of love birds starved of privacy and these love birds are looked down by the hundreds of upper middle class citizens - majorly the last true representatives of the 'Marathi Manoos' - the Marathi man - of Mumbai.

nautanki.tv operates some 100 meters away from THAT Shivaji Park. It is kind of a skunk operation. The building is residential and the office had an old bone surgeon's clinic (we still have a ceiling anchor which kept the xray machine in place). We have wooden stairs and the floor of the office has a very faded rexine covering thats keeps peeling off. Like true startups everyone shares the space and everyone is everywhere. If you need a place to sit then you need to come in early and hijack someone else's chair. Amar Singh (am not joking) our VP Pantry makes great tea and we get requests from very known people about the secret of his recipe.

Somewhere along the last three months we have begun to function like a Pirate operation. We have done what others take ages to do in an operation that has been quite and stealthy.

The only thing missing are the pirate bandanna and the skull flag. Some of our guys are getting that ready too. Soon Shivaji Park will have a huge Pirate flag in front of one of it's buildings.

watch out you your out there!

alexa ranking trivia

hey folks worried about the nautanki.tv ranking on alexa.

as of 8 august we are 75669 in world ranking up from 1,036,058811719 three months back.

India ranking is now upto 2809 up from 2976 on 6th august.

ram

nautanki.tv is a finalist in the Red Herring Asia 100 Awards

nautanki.tv - our little venture is now amongst the top 200 finalists of RedHerring Asia 100 Awards

We have come a long way. Hope we do win the RHAsia 100 award now.

Sunil R Nair

on survival, running google adsense and other trivial matters

Hello,

Five people so far have questioned the survival of nautanki.tv. Two of them have called us desperate and one has suggested in a private email things that I do not wish to discuss here!! Such passion.

In the normal course of life I would not bother about these quibbles at all and not even bother to respond, but this morning one of the junior most guys here asked me and I quote "Sunil, you pay the publishers on time, pay the content guys on time, even the salaries from day one have been on time, then why do these guys - the bloggers doubt the survival of the company?" I had to answer and here are the simple home truths about nautanki.tv

1. We run adsense ( and we will run adsense forever ) on our anchor portal not because that gets us money. The money that we get from there would not cover even the chai costs. We run it because I personally admire Google. They changed the way advertising was done everywhere and made it possible for a new business model to emerge. We run Adsense because when agencies site target www.nautanki.tv for their campaigns we are able to go back to the clients and talk to them about doing business with them. :) Which translates into revenue for everyone - including the publishers.
2. We run it on the website and not on the network of over 1500 websites. Had we done that we would have been able to rake in big money. But we are not desperate :). (by the way being desperate is a good state of mind to be in for a startup, it reminds you that resources have to be utilized better)
3. The nautanki.tv channels are primarily for video content. We (surprise! Surprise!) webcast original content. This content comes after the TVC and the TVC is incidental. The TVCs pay for the content, so far we have paid out of our pockets but someday the trend will change.
4. We created the network as a distribution medium for short format content, for documentaries and work that never gets visibility because the powers that be do not see value. We work with close to 200 film makers who now see nautanki.tv as an option to showcase their work and maybe make money. Did any of you guys know that documentaries that we webcast get viewership from around the world? and that we single handedly give more viewers to the independent film makers than all the OTHER guys put together.
5. Autoplay was a demand that came from the publishers. We will make available both options with and without autoplay soon. Publishers make money when there are paying ads on the network and when their traffic clicks to watch the content end to end.
6. We think we have gone beyond the point where there are any doubts about whether we will survive or not. We are well funded. We do not believe in making announcements about how much and from where. The proof of the pudding is, dear sirs, in eating it, well in this case you do your bit and get to the Rs 10000 mark and we will send that nice little cheque to you with a thank you note. We have done that for the last 5 months and have created a mini ecosystem by that virtue alone.


So there am done explaining.

So when people talk about alexa ranking (by the way today we are at 2976 in India)we do not know what to tell them for they do not understand what nautanki.tv is all about. When they say we are desperate we smile and get back to work. Rome they say was not built in a day.

Cheers

Hello there

hi

This is my first post here on this blog. I have been told to blog here often enough but i always shied off citing a number of reasons.

but the real reason was i did not have anything to talk about.

NOW i have.

Nautanki.tv is now moving. The environmental elements of content providers, publishers and finally the long and eagerly awaited advertisers are here. Our upgrade to the player and its associated back end which targets the Advertising Demographically, Geographically and Contextually has paid off.


The next upgrade will be to handle the Immense traffic build up with is now in TB's a day. and no i don't mean tuberculosis i mean Tera Bytes yes BYTE not bit.

We are enabling clustering, pumping up RAM, Quadrapuling the bandwidth, tighter code, a better interface for all, etc etc.

On the whole we shall be shortly migrating to version 2.0.

what does it mean to the user, publisher,content guys and advertisers.

A better system, more focused on deliverables , less procedural hassles. and most importantly more money and more bang for the buck.


nautanki.tv is now storming up the rankings and its on its way to beating competition and overtaking them in the viewership stakes.

But as usual we have our own set of doubting Thomases.

but all these doubts are because of not really understanding what nautanki.tv is.

a lot of people assume that we are an advertising network.
more than a few think that we are another you tube clone.
a few even think that we play naughty videos.

but what is nautanki.tv???

Its Television Online. Just like you have television channels on you television we are Television on the net. and just like television we are recovering the cost of making and webcasting the content by playing ads.

the difference is that the advertiser can have a better engagement with the viewer. Its like talking to an audience of ONE and a call to action with a click which can get them a client in a jiffy.

but nautanki.tv bigger role is enabling the repressed creative talent in this country to get an audience to tell their story using an audio visual platform.

we are doing for film makers what all the popular talent competitions on TV are doing for the singers and dancers.

Also there have been a lots of bouquets and brickbats because of the Auto Play feature being enables.

There was this one comment i read somewhere

"The video starts playing and visitors get diverted from the topic and start watching the ad."

When will people get it that people also watch the content. Nautanki is like an RSS feed of video content on your site. It ads value for to your site. We have found that our publishers have had in increase in visitors by 30% month on month since they have added a nautanki.tv video feed

continuesssss......

saturdays are never the same now!

Hello,

It has been sometime since the last blog post. There has been too many things going on and time has been at a premium. The last four saturdays have been days when one has woken up at six in the morning, got ready and driven into office to ensure that things that were pending from the week do not spill over into the next week. Gone are the days of leisurely coffee and a breakfast with time.

-----------------------------------------------------

We now have 1500+ video feeds on our system. Everyday we get requests for additional features, solutions for tech problems and "mera paisa kabhi milega" answers. The most curious has been the surge in people wanting to join nautanki.tv as partners or as employees. A few have taken it upon themselves to write in daily with suggestions and ideas on how nautanki.tv can become the next Google, Microsoft, Youtube, Viacom, NewsCorp and so on. Ideas and suggestions are welcome, they help us know that we are on the right track, but emails that tend to be veiled threats, "I was dreaming for as 'CONSULTANT-PARTENER' with NTV, but ball is in yr court now" tend to get tiring. We sometimes offer some of the more enthusiastic publishers a chance to be our affiliates. And they tend to do everything other than do what they are supposed to do.

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We have advertisers finally on our network - remit2india, ebay and ikobo have started their campaigns. This will mean more money for publishers and content providers. Lets hope more come as time goes by. Publishers have to remember that they get paid only when there are paid ads in the network, and that takes time. Please do remember that a new medium will take time to be accepted. After all you guys are part of something that has never been tried before anywhere.

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Our new player went live a couple of weeks ago. We have intelligence in the player - IP targeting, content sense, click through trackers and a few never befores have been put into the player itself. And like any other company we have had people writing back saying they love the player or they hate it. Most hate its are due to the autoplay feature. We promise to take a final stand on the autoplay feature within the next month.

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Alexa Alexa do you see us now? We are crawling up the much followed alexa rankings. Does that help the people who are skeptical? Would you eat your words and humble pie if nautanki.tv reaches the top 100 websites in India? It did not matter to us for we knew what we were saying but then sometimes we too get emotional when people start calling us names and doubt our credentials. Thank you Ram for making this possible.

-------------------------------------------------------

We also have a small social network experiment live now. Test drive it please and let us know

nautanki.tv video feed tips

As our community of web publishers increase everyday, we are discovering the ways and means in which nautanki.tv's feeds are being used to generate video views. One can simply cut and paste the video feeds onto the web pages and hope that people click on the play button and watch the content, but thats a very lazy way of using this powerful medium. Here are a few tips and ways in which a publisher can increase the video views on his / her web pages and thereby translate the traffic that comes to their webpages into revenue.

Tip #1: Don't embed nautanki.tv videos on empty pages
It is bad karma! Empty pages will mean that no one would visit the pages, plus the nautanki.tv system will not know what to classify your page as, hence all you will see on your feed are public service ads that are run for free. Free ads do not make any money for anyone. It is always better to embed the video feeds on pages that have traffic, it increases the chance of someone clicking on the play button and watching the content. Embedding the content in relevant pages will mean that people will find relevance between what you have on the page and what is in the video. When they return they will be more inclined to click on the video window to see whats new. You might want to associate your content with whats available, for example if you are talking about a movie you might want to embed the movie review / Phillumwallah channel feed.


Tip #2: Don't be afraid to ask questions
Write to us as many times as you want. It is a very rare day when one of us does not read the email and replies. Sophie our magic lady in customer services is prompt in taking up your cause and following up with the people at nautanki.tv. If you want to know more about the relation between your website and the kind of content we have, please feel free to write in to info[at]nautanki[.]tv . We also welcome your inputs on the kind of content that you want.

Tip #3: Play on the uniqueness of your content
Make people who read your website want to click on the video feeds by associating your content with the video, by subtling suggesting that they can see a video by clicking on a link etc. We have seen that unique content gets people to come more often and the more people coming onto your website would mean more are the chances of they wanting to see the videos.

There are many ways other than embedding the content onto webpages to increase the views on your feeds. The most popular seems to be sending out the embeds in an HTML page via email to people in your address book. Several of our publishers have been doing this regularly and have been benefiting from the results. You can also create newsletters which combine your website contents with videos from nautanki.tv and send it to people who subscribe to your newsletters. People have also been submitting links on digg, reddit etc and have increased the number of views. The ideas seem to be limitless.

As we grow and have a bigger family we will learn more innovations and innovative uses of our feeds. And we at nautanki.tv will keep sharing them with the publishers. Keep innovating and thank you for your support.

Anger Management :) :)

Patience, wasn't exactly one of my biggest virtues ever. I always loved interacting with others, working with a team and all of that but ironically, my short fuse always gave way. The one most important thing that I have learnt in the past 4 to 5 months is that being a channel producer is definitely not a cake walk. I was sooo damn wrong in thinking it would be easy.

Being a people's person is hard, dealing with them patiently is tougher and then getting work done through all of this is close to getting a glimpse of god!!!

Okay, so I'm exaggerating, but the point is that trying to switch between mental states so that you get along with every member of your team is next to impossible. Trying to do this everyday-- forget it!. Here at nautanki.tv, we get a wide variety of people in all shapes and sizes with a very eclectic mental range. It's a lovely assortment :) but when I had to deal with it initially, this box of assorted chocolates did not seem too wonderful. I admit it. I have flown off the handle quite a few times- bruising, injuring and sometimes demolishing the egos of many of my hard working producers. (I hope I haven't got myself onto their hate lists please).

Well, It's difficult to always relate to everything that comes my way.... right??

But then when I have to say a flat NO to soo many nice ideas oozing out of these creative brains, it's the hardest! These geniuses come with concepts and their faces glowing like 1000w bulbs and when the ideas get rejected, their faces resemble one of those zero power lights. Truly heart breaking. It's these sights that have inspired me to venture into the unknown...... I am becoming patient... beat that! I am becoming more and more tolerant by the day :). In the process, I've realised the true value of my team. They are an awesome bunch... talented and enthusiastic. Now it's my duty to pull up my sleeves and collaborate these scattered thoughts together and help them execute it.

Even if that means that I have to deal with the craziest brains ever created.... I'm all for it!!

TOP TEN SHOWS IN NAUTANKI

Hi guys,

Lets us know your favorite top ten shows in Nautanki.

You can let us know through the comment section :)

Adios

Prax

will they ban us now?

Alootechie published the most juicy part of nautanki.tv's online video consumption report - 85% of online video consumption in India happens from offices and paves way for a flurry of emails to nautanki.tv and two comments on last count on Alootechie itself that we (nautanki.tv) has shot itself in the foot by publishing the report, further adding that now systems admins (may the lord bless their souls) will ban all video sites including YouTube, etc.

Assuming that systems admins in organisations are all intelligent, one would think that they would have already done the needful long before our report. But the truth is that consumption still happens from offices. We think it is because organisations sometimes are nice and do let people chat and browse.

Fortunately for nautanki.tv it does not impact our viewership in any way. 98% of our video views comes from our network of video feeds on close to 1300 web properties. For example SaffronTrail.com is one such web property that has nautanki.tv feeds on its pages. Since the videos are played off so many pages it is not likely that all those pages would be blocked.

What fun!

some little bit more nautanki?

Agencyfaqs has published nautanki.tv's report on online video consumption in India. "New Tube" it screams loud! Read it here They have called it a case study since it looked at the way video is consumed by nautanki.tv's audience. What everyone forgets is that the audience did not come to nautanki.tv the URL / website to watch the videos. They did it off whichever websites they were on. nautanki.tv has 1312 feeds live currently. The point that we are trying to make here is that even if nautanki.tv conducted the study, the viewing happened off other websites, where there is existing traffic. We feel that since the viewing was scattered over such a large base it gave us an accurate feel of the kind of content that is watched and we were able to measure the various factors that goes into good viewing.

If anyone is interested you can download the complete report here

Fun to Work

Well this can be termed as a sequel to the earlier blog entry from Sunil.

Nautanki.tv is now consistently generating good traffic and Content Producers.

The first set of Content Producers were bachcha's who seemed hungry, but lacked temperament; the second encounter was with the experienced one's.. those who talked, discussed, analyzed, committed and never came back..one went back angry!!!

The third kind had the hunger to create and the knack to explore..they made loads of mistakes with their deliverables, but tuned and refined their act at the latter stage. Many of them were also Publishers and Users.

We also came across lots of short films made by 18-24 year olds. Amazing films, good visualization, technically short, but great effort nevertheless.

Its been fun working and interacting with these guys. Learning curve for all concerned, including yours truly.

Moving to the most important part- that of monetizing the efforts!! Nautanki.tv is on track and very soon we will see some good tractions on all pieces of art.

Cheers

mera paisa kab milega?

Hello,

The most common calls to the nautanki.tv office is related now a days to the question 'when will i get paid'? Most of our enthusiastic publishers even call up at 8 am on a saturday and expect that someone would be insane enough to be available to answer the question. Mani called up from Kochi last Saturday and I just happened to have walked in all dressed to make a presentation (I am known to be insane since most days I am in office at eight or even earlier), had I been a little late he would have been treated to a very gruff Amar Singh ( no jokes here ) our man friday and unless you can manage to decipher the Nepalese laden Hindi, you will never figure out what he says. And our dear friend Mani would have gone back and said that nautanki.tv is a scam. (shudder).

To set the record straight we are not a scam, we pay on time and the following are the answers to most of your questions:

1. When do I get paid?
Answer: You get paid when your account reaches Rs 10000 in a calender month. In case you make Rs 12500 in a month then the amount payable to you is rounded to the nearest Rs 10000 multiple and the balance amount is carried forward to the next month.

2. When do the cheques reach me?
Answer: All cheques are written out between the 5th and 10th of the month. The cheques for May 07 would get written between 5th and 10th of June 07. The cheques are sent by courier ( DTDC or Blue Dart ) and usually reach the publishers by the 12th of the month.

3. When are the cheques payable?
Answer: Cheques are payable on the 5th of the following month. For example if your account reaches Rs 10000 in May, the cheques will be mailed out to you by the 10th of June and you can deposit them after the 5th of July.

4. Why the 30 day period?
Answer: There are several reasons for this period, the primary reason is that we assume that our advertisers would be nice and pay us within that period. If they do not we would like to have some breathing space. Please do remember we are a startup and we DO NOT have deep pockets.

5. When will all this information appear in the publisher accounts sytem?
Answer: We have a major system upgrade slated for this month and if Ram permits we will have the answers online.

In case you still have queries and want a human being to answer your questions please feel free to write to info[at]nautanki[.]tv and Sophie will reply as soon as she can.

Cheers

Alexa Alexa where art thou?

You know you are doomed when you sit in front of internet experts and talk till your mouth runs dry and the only reaction that comes by from the 'royal highness' is "What is your Alexa rank?". What to do? we are normally like this only!

Well nautanki.tv ranks at 424,097 on Alexa!!!

Must we run scared? or are we bothered? No actually. The reason is that Alexa counts traffic to a destination using the Alexa tool bar which is installed in a lot of browsers. Currently the number of browsers that have Alexa tool bar is a debatable point. So if you were to type in www.xyzabc.com - Alexaji will tabulate how many others have done the same and will rank you. Fair enough but not fair to nautanki.tv because 95% of our video segment consumption does not happen on nautanki.tv. it happens on the 1113 video feeds across the internet. These never register on Alexaji's counters. So we never figure anywhere close to other respectables.

We do however break into the top 100000 websites in the world when the media writes about us and people come visiting. When that happens they register as publishers and go away with a little bit of nautanki.tv in their lives and web pages.

And we - all 18 of us in Mahim, Mumbai smile and get back to more work.

Another powerhouse joins Team nautanki.tv

Achuthan Kutty, former founder of India’s first Interactive Agency Bridge Over TW, has joined nautanki.tv in Bangalore. He will be heading Business Development and Alliances for nautanki.tv.

Achuthan has been one of the pioneers in the interactive media space in India and has been in the advertising business for the past 25 years. He comes with very strong media understanding as well as a strong business development and client servicing background.

Commenting on his new assignment, Achuthan said, “Interactive advertising has been my passion; however it has been downgraded to the level of a sales only channel with virtually everyone looking at the Interactive Agency with the same lenses as a Direct Sales Agent. Pushing this to the limit and having only responses as the metric for the most part is in many ways killing the industry and robbing it of its vitality. I was on the lookout for doing something quite different, but yet within the Interactive Space and the offer from Nautanki, fitted me like a glove. While it is a start up I have no doubt of the capabilities of nautanki.tv and my move is in a way symbolic of how much I believe in nautanki.tv’s capabilities and growth potential. Moreover the position is as a Consultant, which gives me the freedom to pursue other non conflicting interests. ”

Welcome Achuthan, lets do some nautanki together.

newest member in team nautanki.tv

He is kind of blue, so his parents (srishti and priya) named him indigo. Very aggressive, he has head butted a female already - she died recently. He normally tends to hang around the sales area in the office and flares his plumes when he gets annoyed with someone interfering with his space.

Presenting Indigo - our very own mascot.

nautanki.tv on regional websites

Very recently Digital Inspiration and WatBlog said almost identical things and I quote "This 400x350 Nautanki.tv widget can also be good source of revenue for regional language blogs (like in Hindi, Tamil, etc) where contextual advertising programs like Adsense do not perform so well."

Considering that almost 60% of the internet population in India do not consider English as their first language of choice, we expect to see a lot of action in this space. Lets face it most Indians are comfortable reading in their mother tongue. You will therefore find a Gujarati websites doing better than an English one and so on.

At the same time digital media buyers seem to ignore this fact and pretend to be catering to the English audiences.

nautanki.tv will very soon be activating the regional publishers programs with content created for their needs and advertising thats more local.

work in progress

hi guys,

work in progress to make nautanki.tv, the worlds most progressive online platform in terms of participation.

on one hand, you have content/ film producers participating by displaying their work and monetise;
on the other hand you have viewer participation thru' various blogsites/ web properties wanting more
and finally u have brands participating to take their products closer to the tg.

i will liken it to a movement which is gaining grounds horizontally & vertically.

its great to meet sincere film producers/ content producers young n ol, so very passionate about their work and wanting people to watch their films,
its great to hear content producers reacting positively to every comments that are posted,
its great to read from people unknown who have posted their suggestions to make nautanki.tv better at every step.

cheers and thanks for all ur support

monday morning blues and other such incidents

"Online video viewing has surely become the latest rage. Nautanki.tv is one such site that works as an online video network and also serves as a platform for filmmakers." Says Mid-Day on Sunday. Read more here

The ecosystem of content producers fueling content consumption fuelling ad revenue is now a well established model and nautanki.tv leads the way. Our belief is that regular television content has a mass appeal but there are people who want to watch original content. Last month's experiment with IDPA did prove that we were right afterall.

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AlooTechie featured nautanki.tv's appointment of Srishti and the news item gets three comments too. (whoa! we have almost made it). Prasath has an interesting suggestion that we allow the publishers to make content for us with brands embedded in them. Well Prasath, thank you for the suggestion but sir who will get the brands to participate? And we are not an Youtube clone. Blogger Eklavya expresses doubts about nautanki.tv's ability to touch 12 crores in revenue this year - all I can say is that time will tell. We might as well exceed it too. But then hey it does take time. Blogger Satya asks what the source of revenue is - it is good old advertising using some intelligence. The ads will become clickable but at no time will nautanki.tv jump onto the bandwagon of being a lead gen machine. More as the week goes by.

missings links restored

Thank you Amit for noticing that several links on the nautanki.tv pages were pointing into a black hole. They have been restored.

Some interesting nautanki.tv numbers

Over the last few weeks I have been asked repeatedly why I think nautanki.tv would work. The reasons are simple and came from a media planner in the offline world (he plans media campaigns using newspapers and television). It seems that the overall comsumption of television in SEC A has gone down to about 20 minutes in the top ten metros / mini metros in India. The very same people it seems are now online from their offices and get all their entertainment from the internet. There is lack of genuine made for internet entertainment - segments within the 3.5 minutes duration. What nautanki.tv has done via the video feeds is to take the video content to the traffic that inhabits niche categories. This way the correct audience gets to see the right advertising and that results in amazing brand recall. Add to this the fact that we can send the TVC based on the region where the traffic is coming from, factor in demographics and a little bit of intelligent context and we have a killer medium.

The cumulative viewership on nautanki.tv network is at 500000 plus with a daily consumption of over 11 lakh segments. A segment comprises of a 30 second TVC + the content episode + 30 second TVC. The most popular channels in nautanki.tv are: Angoor, Phillumwallahs and Soul Curry. The websites that carry their feeds fall in the following category:

Angoor & Phillumwallahs - Youth and Bollywood centric websites and blogs
Soul Curry - women, travel, lifestyle centric

Mirch Masala - serious news centric and social issue websites and blogs. Mirch masala also has the highest number of embeds in the vernacular websites and blogs.

Chakachak has the most niche position with almost everyone subscribing to the feeds having websites and blogs catering to bikes, cars, fashion, advertising and young adult.

Republic being UGC centric and gets just 2% of embeds and these are from people who have embedded all the feeds in order to generate maximum revenue.

The maximum traffic / viewership is on Angoor (25%) and Phillumwallahs (20%. Mirch Masala gets close to 15% of the viewership, Soul Curry gets 18%. Chakachak gets 14% while Republic gets merely 8% of the viewers.

We can derive meanings from looking at the share of traffic and corelate it to which category of websites / blogs etc have taken the respective feeds and find out that the maximum traffic seems to come from youth specific web properties. Even if embeds of a channel are in larger number of web properties the traffic generated might be lesser in number.

Unfortunately the media agencies do not know how to classify us. The old media ones say it is internet and the digital agencies are stuck in the rut of providing click throughs and leads. Something tells me that it is time for nautanki.tv to set the standard for online video media and create a sub category. The movement has already started elsewhere in the world, maybe it is time we in India went ahead and claimed this territory.

INSIDE NAUTANKI by Praxation

Abhijeet Ghosh Finally Graduates

After all the hardwork.. (from me Prax) Abhijeet Ghosh had finally graduated from NIFT. His design reached in time and he pulled of one of the most inconvienient attempt which he might not try again ( to graduate). Now the news is he is partying and Prax as usual is busting his $#@ off to finish the scheduled programming.

NAUTANKI GOES LIVE TO CONTENT PRODUCERS

Now all those Content Producers can get a sigh of relief who were ripping DVDs after DVDs, and running to Shivaji Park (no not for jogging... Nautanki's office is there) to deliver the shows. Now you can register to Nautanki.TV as Content Producers and upload you shows from the comfort of your home. Now I wonder is there an examination process for the uploads cuz there is no limitation of perverts in the internet who can provide you explicit content, on a positive note that can increase the views as well as the drools. You can also see the revenue generated by your show through the views once you log on. By the way Mr. Sunil.. I had registered 2 days back and its still not approved.

SPY CAM HITS NAUTANKI

SPY CAM show hits Nautanki(DOT)TV and our favorite viewer Mr. RISHI had ruined our excitement about the show. He actually didnt like the show. Well we will have to take it as it is... but next time I think I am gonna stop having high expectations about my shows :(. Also watch out for WISE GUYS INC, BAZAKUFOOKISTAN, RATE MY TALENT and A BEAUTIFUL MIND.

ZAPAKUFOOKISTAN NAME CHANGED

Due to some unavoidable reasons Zapakufookistan's name had to be changed to Bazakufookistan along with double work for MR. PRAX. So its the same show with the same Horny sheikh with his body guard running around camels leaving behing hot women. I still think the name could have been a good advertisment for the people who sacked the title of this show as of anyways they are unheard of.

THE FEAR IS GONE!!!

The fearful HANDLES of our Content Head had suddenly disappeared. Yes am talking about VIKRAM and his Dangerous Moustache.. its gone.. Now i dont fear him and neither would other content providers. Is that a good thing or a bad thing.. hmmm.

Nyways STAY TUNNED for more....

PRAX

Nautanki.tv appoints ex-Rediffusion hand Srishti Sawhney

"Nautanki.tv, which was launched in November 2006, is on a consolidating spree. The online video media network has roped in Srishti Sawhney as head of marketing and account management" says Agencyfaqs.com. Read more here

What the news networks do not mention is that she is a team player to the core, people relax easily in her presence. Her key strengths include strategic thinking, multi-multitasking and making people deliver (with as little bloodshed as necessary). She is a hands-on problem solver with the ability to initiate change.

Though aloof from the polemics of sexes and the conflict of gender, She wants “half the sky”… is A ‘sucker’ for her yellow Labrador ‘Oyster’, travel and good sushi, she spends her weekends trying every new restaurant in town.

The Monkey, by the Chinese horoscope, Srishti is all Yin. She likes beautiful things: Aromatherapy, karmic healing, artistic yoga and Johnny Depp.

We promise to persuade her to allow us to photograph her and put the pic up here soon.

Welcome Srishti to the nautanki

We were hacked

nautanki.tv was down for 7 hours on 10 May 2007. A hacker managed to enter the nautanki.tv system and insert malicious content onto the system. Ram and his able team managed to get things back up in a phased manner. We are happy to say that we are alive and are rocking as before.

The hacker has been identified and legal proceedings have been started. We have a signed confession from the hacker.

The downtime gave us an insight into how our community views us. There were many emails that questioned us about our ability to run nautanki.tv and such, at the same time there were emails from publishers who offered to help us identify the problem, who went out of their way to give us their valuable time to test the systems before we went online again. We have had this wave of goodwill that came from nowhere. I humbly thank everyone of them.

nautanki.tv is not some great big organisation that has suddenly come alive promising to change the world. We are a startup and we face everyday every problem that people our size face. We stumble and fall, but we get back up dust ourselves and try again.

We are committed to create a viable ecosystem and every member of team nautanki.tv knows it will never be easy. We promise one thing - we will make history.

Thank you once again.


Sunil R Nair
CEO, nautanki.tv

we were hot last month, we are now merely hotter

Wooing NRIs with online videos

Business Standard says "NautankiTV, along with big players like Rajshri Media and StarTV’s indya.com, is targeting the non-resident Indian (NRI) community with online videos and looking at advertisers who also plan to attract this customer base." Read more here


Sure they got the name nautanki.tv wrong and all that but hey we are not complaining. I do remember asking "Google?!!! woh kya?" some years ago.

hum businessworld mein bhi

We are famous!!

how viral is viral? and other musings

Last week saw my belief in the power of the net being reconfirmed. nautanki.tv finally went viral. It spread like wild fire across the net space in India with blogs and rss feeds abuzz with our distribution model for content. We are very close to attaining critical mass and all logic points to a redux of what happens to good ideas. We are gearing up to doubling our feeds every week. Which would mean that we would become a significant player much earlier than expected. The answer to how viral is viral can be answered by looking at the way myspace grew or how youtube redefined video content. We are viral in that sense.

What does this mean for the content owner? The answer lies in the fact that today no one can get content across to audiences the way we can, 24x7 we can feed content to audiences who want to see humour, docu dramas, spirituality etc from wherever they are on the net. It means that someone like Altergraph - one of our content partners can now make shows that will have an audience however small they maybe.

For the advertiser it is more value for their money, here is a way to get to audiences that are focussed, where the brand salience gets established better than on television. Small brands that want to reach targeted audiences without blowing a whole in theirs pockets can advertise in small quantums.

nautanki.tv has started a small fire which now is begining to look like a wild fire.

IDPA Nautanki.tv awards pics

The IDPA Nautanki.tv online awards - bubblies



Gauri Warudi being presented the winners award for Silent Ghungroos by Kavita Chaudhary



Vikram Prabhu - Head of Content, nautanki.tv, Aditya Seth and George of IDPA



Team Nautanki

usual suspects II

Vijay - our camera and lighting expert. If you love the rich look of our in house shows, this is the man you want to meet



Vinod and Poonam. Poonam schedules the various shows on nautanki.tv, Vinod edits and create magic with raw footage.



Thats me :) and the buck stops here

the usual suspects

Here are a few of the people behind nautanki.tv - the ones who make this ecosystem tick.



Priya - she normally is found threatening the clips into submission. She is our Channel Producer



Herumb our resident expert on all things spiritual and head of servicing, he ensures that the clients are kept happy always



This is Mr Prabhu - our head of content. Deep in thought about the next lunch. As you might have guessed it right, Mr Prabhu loves food.

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We will have more pictures added to this series as we go along.

musings from here and there

Been reading a lot of corporate bios in the hope that they would be able to put some light into the workings of businesses that have grown virally. So far have read up the ebay story, google and have dipped into the workings of Apple. One thing is sure after reading these stories - there are no secret sauces for success. Ideas have to wait for the right blend of time, money, people and circumstances to make it big. And not in the same order. A business plan cannot ever get it right. No matter what the VCs say.

nautanki has reached that sweet spot. It is viral in nature, it has a community aspect and it reaches deep into places that did not exist before. It is an ecosystem that is symbiotic in nature, where the viewer feeds the content owner who in turn makes stuff for the thousands of websites. Now one has to make it into a cult brand. Maybe do a Guy Kawasaki and find an evangelist to take to the masses. We have some 27 filmmakers who take the idea to others and now are beginning to bring in people who are not seperated by the proverbial seven degrees.

ah! that reminds me of a journalist asking me if we are going to ever change the name. The answer is a firm no. nautanki is a fine name, Indians will never forget it and the rest of the world will wonder what it means. Either ways we have top of the mind recall. Am not sure if "lets nautanki it will ever" go on to be what Google is but we can try. Maybe "chalo nautanki karein" will be the equivalent of "let us google"

My brother in arms Mr Prabhu says that if there is a word in the Indian dictionary we should have a video for it - this ambitious to say the least. But I think there is value in people searching for something in mumbai and finding a video for the same. Imagine doing it for Guwahati and Alamaty and a small city in Outer Mongolia and then getting local ads.

Like I said we are just about hitting the right spot

________________________________________________________________________________

Let me welcome at this point Srishti Sawhney into the nautanki.tv family. Srishti comes with an amazing career in advertising account management. She has handled clients like Coke and has some 14 years of experience in the advertising rumble. Srishti will be responsible for Ad Sales in Western and Northern India.

We are sure she loves doing nautanki once in a while!

boss bol kya bolta hai!

Hi,

We went live with 74 min. of daily/ fresh prog yesterday. God! It was some experience. Now the situation is, we have more than 60 min. of fresh content available for daily consumption and the entrire time goes in putting them together in an uniform basket... Its painful, yet fun.

This entire process of aggregation, production, packaging, marketing, capsuling, selling, promoting has made the team grow as a unit.

Now we can stand up to anybody in the content market and say, 'boss bol kya bolta hai'!

One of my producers excitedly called up saying, 'arre my content which went live yesterday has generated more than 1000 hits in just one day!, i am motivated to do more now, lets talk'..now that 1000 hits a day/ a content is just the tip of the ice berg which runs deeper than what one can ever imagine.

By the way, we've been approached by two of the top most media & entertainment companies, asking us if we could broadcast their content on nautanki.tv...kya bolta hai!

I knew this was true - Internet is God

itz a bugs life!

They say when you get into public domain be ready to take on people who will rip you apart for things that are insignificant. nautanki.tv is in public domain now, we have had a consistent viewership of 100000 segments per day for sometime, some 50 odd web properties subscribe to the nautanki.tv feed. The system works. But as with anything new - its has bugs, these surface when we use the system to its max. For example we upgraded our viewer (the small window that plays the video) last night and realised that the controls get disabled for no reason when the video plays for the first time. When you replay the same video the second time at the end of the segment the controls come back alive. Strange things go on. And we are scratching around to figure out why. It seems now that the problem is at the developer level - the guys who made the basic player have a bug!!!

The viewing experience is better now. You can go full screen. Just right click and follow options. We serve a mean channel!

Last night we also were hit by somebody who wrote thus on a public forum:

"The site is very poor in navigation.
The links are not functional

It is still in Beta testing, I would advise you to set it up and functional before promoting it"

Then the guy writes in private that he did not understand the system. What can one do with him? grin and bear it I suppose.

We are ok with people who take us to task for system failures, who write in saying we suck. Then the very same ones go on and help us rectify the problems. I cannot understand the types who just denounce.

nautanki.tv is a movement and we are happy to be a part of it.

Mixed bag of talent explodes on Nautanki.tv!

April is a very crucial month for us. Nautanki.tv will have 1 hour of fresh programming across all the channels starting from April. When the intensity of pulling off something like this finally descended upon us in Feb-March we all broke out in cold sweat; to put it mildly. We had shoe string budgets at hand and were supposed to create this very generous mass of content that would be impactful, strong, snacky, edgy, stylish and lots more!
So, I was staring at the walls in our office one eventful evening out of sheer exhaustion. How and where were we supposed to start!

Then began our very exciting task of meeting content producers. This I must say was highly exciting. We met people who had made some great short films, we met people who had worked in professional media settings, we met people who wanted to do something related to films and TV and desperately needed a platform and we also met people who were busy shooting their pet dogs peeing on roads and putting these very catchy videos on YouTube. We met a whole bunch of talented, funny and interesting people. Some were really good and some were not, but the most important thing to remember here is that all of these people had something in common. They were all eager. Eager and impatient to direct their own film, eager to act , eager to make it on their on and the eager to succeed. Personally, I loved them all and really wish I could work with everybody.

Now this mixed bunch of people is producing a whole lot of content for us and the best part is that they also get to make good amount of money through it. That's nautanki for you.

If you still haven't heard about us then simply pick up the current issue of Business Today. We are featured as one of the 10 best start ups in the country and mind you, we happen to be the youngest of the lot. Now comes the difficult part of living upto it. But I'm not getting worked up. We have enough ammunition to really crack this thing.

Wish us luck!

april's fool

April's here, almost!...we thought we will struggle to create a hr of daily fresh programming. On the contrary, we are struggling alright, but the struggle is now on scheduling the huge amount of content, we have 'Amassed'. 'Aggregated' could have been the right word, but trust me it would have been an understatement.

The show genres on nautanki.tv is getting wider horizontally and shud match all the verticals in terms of reach & revenues :) keeping our investors happy :))

The team now has sunil, herumb, priya, vinod, poonam, vishwanath, vijay, man singh, vijay II, rahul & gang, ramanand, abhijeet, satyajit, dalton, gautam & gang, pradeep, kunal, zarina, sahastrabuddhe, akshai & gang, nandita, deepshika, ram, sanjeev & gang, peeyosh and urs truly.

Original Content the only way out on the internet

We have met a lot of investors, pretenders and content owners. On cue the conversation veers away into areas like - YouTube, Star Tvs initiative on Indya.com and such mundane things.

Our point has been always firm on the fact that the Internet media is a different animal. TV content recut or repurposed will be too expensive to procure and even worse is the attitude of the television channels. Movies is impossible because of non starters like minimum guarantees. We firmly believe that short format content - the kind thats best suited for the net can be produced at a fraction of the cost of what it takes to make regular TV content. The attitude, style and grammar have to be different. The viewer on the net has other more interesting things to do and watch and snacking is what he wants off you. So give him things that are snacky in nature. Much like MTV India or ETC.

Most content creators in India do not seem to understand the economics of the game. Nautanki.tv is providing content creators a platform to reach an audience, we are also selling ad spots to brands who are willing to buy the space. And we share the revenue with the content creators. So if the content is great there is no limit to what they can earn. Of course we will also make money.

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Have a look at this:

from april onwards

yes we are finally on our way to become a 1 hour fresh programming network.
we will be hosting various shows like:

1. the politician (satire): introducing satyajit padhye and his puppet. satyajit plays the quintessential politician and the puppet is his alter ego
2. gas: all bull shit...spoof on hindi films starting with rang de basanti meets himesh, the reshamiyya
3. vardenchi mobikes: the dc of mobikes..shud become cult
4. maestros: covering the high n mighty of indian music
5. young icons from various fields
6. morning buddies: comic strip, slapstick, below the belt humour
7. dr.deepak: a doctor meets film maker meets docu-maker meets choreographer meets actor meets camera man meets editor meets singer meets music director meets assistant director meets the spot boy meets...hitting the pot..
8. son of kbc
9. more serious short film and many many more..
   

from may onwards we start

1. india unqiue: india unexplored, unknown facets, unqiue india
2. a comic strip animation series, on the lines of calvin & hobbes meets tom n jerry kinda stuff with indi flavour
3. khau galli's of mumbai
4. plus finance shows, bizness shows, ad & mktg. shows, woman centric shows, fashion related stuff etc
   

take off

hi,

post all the online & offline organic coverage, nautanki.tv featured on the latest edition of business today (22nd mar'07-8th apr'07 issue) as one of the ten start-ups in india.

reminded me of the day when i would surf thru' the biz mags and wonder when i wud feature.

well the day dawned, but the excitement ceased to exist!

for now i wasn't looking to get featured just as a potential, but as an achiever. as our investor always says 'r.o. kitna aaya'..

nautanki.tv has started well, now we need to consolidate.

good job sunil, herumb, priya & the rest and now gear up to take it to the nxt level.

all the best nautankians..god bless

cheers,

vikram

Our cyber kid-- Nautanki.tv

Vikram told me about a smashing concept..... having television on the internet. okay, so i had heard about western countries doing it and was familiar with YouTube.

So how were these three guys, namely Sunil, Vikram and Herumb were going to make it happen. Being gifted with a strong instinct somewhere inside me, I Knew it would work but will they be able to sustain? Whatever the case, I was mighty excited and asked Vikram if I could be a part of it. Initially it wasn't a very practical idea and my folks almost went into frenzy when they heard it. Not to mention my closest friends who had something almost close to an epileptic fit when they heard that I was planning to change my job!!! Again!!!!

But what the hell, I thought and went ahead. Everything was hunky dory when I started working for it. Ofcourse, thinking about how I was going to manage my finances initially did drive me into dementia, but I hung on. After all, this was a job i was loving after a really really long time and i didn't want to miss the opportunity of working with such fantastic people.

Nautanki.tv did kickstart and how!! We began talking about it to our friends & acquaintances and they started watching out channel. It felt wonderful. There really are no other words to describe the feeling, the emotion. Everyone had taken a massive risk in making this channel happen and now that it was there for the whole world to see, it felt glorious. It was like how new mothers feel when they give birth. Yes .... Nautanki was our baby, conceptualised with pain staking efforts and made healthy on show string budgets :).

Now ofcourse the baby is growing and growing fast and we are prepared to work for it and on it.

By the way, we recently got funded!!

nautanki.tv is on Screen India

Venkat Mallik, Managing Director Level Up Network India has reviewed nautanki.tv. He says
"While the media is waiting with bated breath for Star TV and Zee to launch Internet Protocol Television (IPTV), a group of media and technology professionals has pulled the carpet from under their feet by launching a 24-hour online channel called Nautanki (www.nautanki.tv).

Visit it; it’s a refreshing introduction to TV-meets-computer, the convergence that everyone has been talking about for the last five years."

Read the rest of the article here

Feels great to be written about.

Media coverage for nautanki.tv

Read Brand Reporter coverage here

Read TechTree coverage here

Read MSN covarage here

Read WatBlog coverage here

Read ContentSutra coverage here

Read Digital Inspiration coverage here

Read GigaOm coverage here

There are lots of other blogs and forums which have featured nautanki.tv, we thank all of them.

But honest, we didn't start the fire...