Chairperson: Rajv Makhni, Managing Editor (Technology), NDTV
Jury Expert & Moderator: Rajen Varada, CEO, Open Community Knowledge

Session Focus:

• Share the best practices in terms of how entertainment is reaching out through the mobile content & medium.
• Role, impact and importance of content services in entertainment & focus on app developer community for better understanding on delivery of entertainment content.

Summit Bytes:

Arjun Jeger, Sooriyan FM mobile app: Sooriyan FM is a member of the Asia Broadcasting Corporation Ltd. It was the first private Tamil radio channel in Sri Lanka and is the market leader & trend setter. It has a very loyal customer base due to its wonderful songs section and up-to-date news broadcasts. However, there is a huge number of Sri Lankan Tamil expatriates all over the world who have been forced to leave their homeland due to the civil war. To enable them to listen to their mother tongue and thus create a home-away-from-home experience, the Sooriyan mobile app was created. The app streams the radio broadcasts live and has features like request for songs, dedicate songs, talk to the RJ, news streaming, instant connection to FB page to share/like a particular programme and an interactive programme guide. There is also a provision for selective content download based on whether the internet connection is strong or weak. It has a very clear audience and niche cultural content that appeals emotionally to that audience, making it hugely popular.

Sajo Mathews, ZAPR: With increasing use of the internet, the way we watch TV is changing drastically- there is a lot of clutter, our schedules rarely match with that of the shows we want to watch and the social group with whom we want to watch TV is more geographically dispersed. ZAPR was created to solve precisely these issues. It is a smart TV assistant that changes the way we watch TV. On activation, it syncs the mobile device with TV passively with zero effort.  It captures the ambient frequencies and transmits it back to the data centre which compares it with data from hundreds of TV channels to find out which one. Thus it slowly learns about the viewing preferences of the individual and then provides personalized recommendations of programmes that the user would want to watch, ensuring the user doesn’t miss out on his favourites.  Another interesting feature is the ability to watch TV with your friends virtually enabling notifications on social groups created through the app and allowing chat during the course of a programme. Through into the mix an intuitive TV guide and cool statistics about TV watching behaviour of the user, the app really is a PDA for TV viewing.

Pulkit Ahuja, Unlockar: The most premium real estate space on smart phones is the lock screen. Everyday an individual views the lock screen at least 20-30 times. Rather than staring at the boring black screen, the app populates the space with interesting content. The user can select different channels to get the content on the lock screen. With a single swipe, the user could also share the content. Moreover, each time the user unlocks his phone, he is rewarded with a U-coin. Every evening, a bidding is conducted for promotional offers/ samples from companies, which people could bid for using their U-coins. Thus, it rewards the user for unlocking their phones and allows companies to advertise on a space that the user simply cannot neglect.

Suraj Sapkoto, Picovico: If a picture speaks a thousand words, a video speaks a million. Videos are the most powerful medium to convey any information and all users want to make and share videos to get their stories across. However, video making is not that simple and would need expertise and investment. Moreover, mobile video making softwares take about 1 hour for rendering the same, simply because processors aren’t built to support this. Picovico allows users to create beautiful videos from photos, videos and text with the help of a variety of custom-made templates. Moreover, all the processing is done by cloud server, so video rendering would take all of 15 seconds. Companies could design their template and ask for user-generated video to be made using this as an effective PR strategy.

Panel Recommendations:

• Till some time back, the war between mobile companies for gaining consumer share had always been about better hardware specifications. But with the scope of this differentiation reducing with better technological access, consumer share would be dictated by which services they would be able to offer.
• In this service-driven differentiation, entertainment would play the biggest role and there is huge scope for the same.
• Any entertainment service must leverage the benefits of crowd sourcing for content generation to be truly effective.