After Bharti, MTN chose to court Reliance. It sounds like a whorehouse. MTN is playing the perfect mistress to the hilt and has no compunctions to court customers; all in order to increase it’s share valuation. Reliance is eager to get a hold of their booty because it realises what Airtel doesn’t. It can easily scale up it’s investments in other parts of the world, negotiate for better prices of it’s equipment and telecom gear and leverage it’s investments in entertainment by offering value added services.
Anil Ambani’s fascination seems to have stemmed in from watching too many movies (1,2) and his scaling up his investments in Hollywood as well as his maiden venture Big Flix Spearheading these investments is Amit Khanna who is a failed producer of Hindi movies.
Entertainment in Indian terms is very coarse to define. Indian laws are “strict” as far as the western counterparts are concerned and what passes through the censor’s scissors is defended in terms of artistic freedom. It’s futile to comment on the various crop of heriones who serve as a fodder for casting couches but this association of money and glamour has been significant. Anil Ambani is trying to marry the two different worlds of films and telecom; hoping that it would click. He bought a chain of theatres to justify his expansion in US and hoping to fructify his couple of millions in Hollywood.
All in all his efforts to bring forth the broadband revolution have come to a naught. Long time back, I could starry eyed kids jamming on the country wide LAN and getting to play the first person shooter games. It was an idea that was well ahead of it’s time and it’s been ages literally that I have visited a Reliance Web World myself. Have they been given a decent burial? I have no clue. But Anil Ambani is very keen to scale up his investments in portals like Zapak. Not only it has a weird sounding name, it has full scale coding errors. Big Flix suffers from patchy server connectivity and it’s easier to log on to You Tube and watch a movie than suffer endlessly on Big Flix and expecting it to load up.
Movie rentals are yet untested success formula and I’d be happy to visit the neighbourhood shop owner who gives me a better service than a nameless dude giving me a DVD. If Anil Ambani really wants to make it big, he should explore the Broadband route and serve the movies from a decentralised server; single server costs would skyrocket once the service catches on. He should ensure minimum downtime and always on connectivity in excess of 5 Mbps. This is a tall order indeed and needs huge investments. Although, the returns would be manifold.
He is on the cusp of launching his DTH platform (one of his significant investments) called as BIG TV and hopes to catch up with the existing players. I don’t endorse his investments as yet; atleast not in the TV and Media (BIG FM for radio).
Can you see a pattern? He’s aiming for a cyber presence and across the cross spectrum of media. As and when private FM channels are allowed to transmit news (which would be a sad day indeed), BIG FM, BIG TV, BIG Flix et al would be at the forefront with perhaps “BIG Paper”‘ too.
If you click on the links to You Tube, you’d find his reason to marry the actress too. Sadly, she doesnt inspire him much for broadband though.
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