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