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.

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

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...