X
2011

YAHOO TO WOO USERS WITH INDIAN MOVIES

August 19, 2011 0

 

Movies are something which interests Indians and Yahoo has struck the chord perfectly to get many users addicted to Yahoo. Yahoo India has come up with a service which is Movieplex wherein the users will get to enjoy full-length Bollywood movies. Yahoo is providing these licensed movies for free via Internet on demand. For its partners, Shemaroo Entertainment is already in, while the Internet giant is hunting for other production houses too so that there would be many more movies for the offing in the times to come.

For the movies which have been already uploaded, the count has reached at eight and the list includes Rock On, Crook, Lamhaa, Dil Toh Baccha Hai Ji, Rann, Aakrosh, Rakht Charitra and Rakht Charitra 2. The movies offered can be played without any commercial break.

In March, this year, there was a report issued by comScore which showed that online videos are being viewed on a high scale and at present, Indian viewers spend over 9.1 billion minutes on a monthly basis for the said purpose. This means that online videos are ranked third in the rankings for content consumption sector. The only two sectors which are above it are sports and news. Moreover people are free to view them whenever they want to.

Arun Tadanki, Managing Director of Yahoo! India said that all over India there are more than 3 crore Internet users and the consumption of these users on a monthly basis shows that 170 – crore videos are viewed. The demand for online videos is even on the rise. Content providers along with the consumers are searching for a platform which could be trusted and where there can be consumption of quality content. Arun didn’t fail to note that the requirement is fulfilled without any form of piracy. Movieplex is a perfect example of Yahoo’s targeting strategy. It is connecting with the likes of their target users. In this given case, Indian’s love for movies is being used to lure more users to be on the site.

As for its competitors on the same lines of context, YouTube which is out of the Google warehouse, had come up with full fledged YouTube Box Office channel earlier in June. As for the advertiser, Intel was partnered, while Yashraj Films, Shemaroo and Nirvana Digital were the content partners. YouTube had however adopted many other methods to keep their viewers engaged. Some of these methods were contests and other movie trivia which was offered along with the full fledged movies. The offering even was in varied languages which included even films of regional languages such as Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi and Gujarati. The count for the major blockbusters offered by YouTube were more than 1500 titles.

For Yahoo, it would be a challenge to keep up the pace as to compete with others, especially YouTube which is backed by the search engine giant and has become a favorite of most of the online video viewers. It has an advantage that it is offering these ad-less movies which are new. The collection would have to be updated on a regular basis so that it not only gets users, but even brings them back again and again.

However, if one wants to watch the listed movies without any ad on Yahoo, they can log on to Movies.Yahoo.in/Movieplex.