Bollywood Ideal Content For Mobile Platform: Neeraj Roy of Hungama

CNET Asia: A snippet from the 3GSM World Congress Asia held in Singapore. Acording to Gregg Creevey, senior vice-president for sales and marketing at business news broadcaster, CNBC Asia-Pacific, “Content investment is not about putting a TV channel on a mobile screen. Rather, operators have to create a different experience from what is already available in mainstream media.”
For India-based mobile content provider Hungama Mobile, this means featuring Bollywood trailers or even full-length movies before their box-office runs. “Bollywood is made for mobile,” said Neeraj Roy, CEO of Hungama Mobile, which provides ring tones, wallpapers, games and movie clips for cellphone users. The company clocks 500,000 downloads a day, he said.
Bollywood movies are especially suited for the mobile platform because of their short song-and-dance medleys, he explained. “It’s normal to see six to seven songs in a Bollywood movie. Even (having) 15 songs is not impossible,” Roy said, noting that Hungama had partnered with an Indian operator to premier a Bollywood movie on a cellphone screen last December. Although response from consumers was lukewarm, he said this initiative assured Indian filmmakers that entertainment in the mobile space was viable. “Studios started to take this medium more seriously,” he said.

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