Saturday, March 31, 2007

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

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.

Friday, March 23, 2007

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