It is lame. Truly. I did come across their blog where they have attempted to “reach out their customers”. At best, it only shows snippets of their website and their product.
Here is the guy who made this commercial. And here is the making of the commercial:
Why this interest in DTH? I have joined as a Reliance customer because I needed their unlimited calling facility. So far, selling their multimedia enabled handsets would allow them to leverage their cross media holdings to reach out to a ready pool of customers. Mercifully, I have been included in their DND list or I would have been spammed about Anil Ambani’s latest venture. I was surprised to see Reliance Web world selling and renting out movies too; in addition to their “broadband”.
DTH remains another of their pipe dreams; it would be interesting to watch them battle it out for the customer’s wallets.
Viewers are spoilt for choice. DTH is a credible option and at the start of the day, I had no frigging clue to the pent up demand for the same. The Direct To Home players like Tatas and Zee have spent oodles of cash on advertisements and hardware roll out that it appears unlikely that a newer player would be able to get a toehold.
Here in the grand strategy of Anil Ambani unfolds. He got the ad labs, poured in money in content creation and would make a huge moolah out of “exclusive” deals with media players. The value added services is a growing market and there is a HUGE space for exclusive content; I was surprised to know that there is a seperate channel for gardening; Tata has one for home tuitions. Although, it cannot replace the classrooms but then parents are keen for any degree of experimentation.
Coming back to IPTV. Does anyone of you readers think that this could make any degree of impact on the viewership? I feel that most of the people mistrust the landline outages (which are so frequent) unless there is a fibre to home coming to their homes with simple instructions to operate the set top box. The present hardware is designed to confuse the first time users; somewhere it ought to ring the bell to make it as simple as possible.
I would reserve my comments on the two competing platforms till the market matures up. Reliance is lying down low with it’s broadband offering. I am still wondering as to what has been the issue at their end. Why are they delaying the commercial launch? There are any number of ideas floating around and if they claim to be India’s number one network as far as the coverage is concerned, they ought to focus on their cherries. Or else, it would die a virgin.
This is making the headlines. Two richest men of the country dragging their fair name in the media and washing their dirty linen for everyone to see. Mukesh Ambani wants to throw a spanner for Anil Ambani’s proposed merger for MTN. I have no clue as to why Reliance chose to work for MTN’s merger with Reliance specially when Airtel broke off the talks with the South African company.
I wanted to embed the clip from Ibn Live; although it works fine but sets up a pop up on this blog which links to their main website. This is very much annoying on their part but they seem to derive major parts of their revenue from these stunts. I am not much conversant with HTML to delete the line causing the pop up; I have removed the offending embeded video totally.
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.
At times the bozos sitting up and making rules seriously surprise me. They have called for implementation of Internet Telephony and Carrier Access Codes.
This was mandated much earlier way back in 2001; however, this was opposed by Bharti. Reliance had entered with the premise of “death of distance” and had made STD calls ridiculously cheap. At that time, Dhirubhai Ambani was still alive and Mukesh and Anil Ambani were still brothers in arms.
If Internet telephony is implemented in it’s present shape, it would see present rates crashing down to a large extent. It would give a new lease of life to ISP’s like Sify and other fringe lunatics to scale up investments. I can foresee the entry of players like Skype as well as other SIP players which rely on open standards. It’s hard not to imagine the real gains to economy as a whole and it would benefit the adoption of setting up of WiFi hotspots on a larger scale.
Carrier access codes means that one can choose his/her service provider and each of the incumbent telecom operator in fixed line business has to provide that option. It means that you can choose Airtel landline to use BSNL’s calling cards to call up you mother in law in Timbuktoo. Granted that mother in laws should remain far away without casting their evil eyes on their kids…..
The major player that’s going to get hurt is BSNL (and MTNL). Unless, they improve their services which are required in the present set up, people are going to abandon them like rats on a sinking ship.
Although, this isnt new and TRAI has probably dusted off it’s old files from it’s dingy offices, still, all compliments to them to even think of doing such a thing. This comes as a breath of fresh air indeed.
Once in a while most of these companies get the urge to “do something”. Having failed to live up to the expectations of it’s customers in the retail broadband business (where it still markets 128k as “broadband”), it’s executives got in a collective swooning and whipped themselves in a frenzy. Anil Ambanis of the world were impressed and gave their assent to change the name of their businesses. Reliance Globalcom is the name of their “new integrated enterprise” where they give the same shitty experience to their existing “idiots of customers” but with a fresh new name
If you look around, Tata had changed their brand to Tata Communications with perhaps the same intention. It hasn’t changed the focus of their work, their ethos and continue to dupe a whole mass of suckers who have no clue as to what broadband really is all about.
Shobhana Subramanian of Business Standard has concrete numbers about Reliance winning the game of spectrum wars. Worth reading. Except for the fact that I had raised the same issues in my earlier posts and now you know why I was dead right about Ambani making it really big.
Apart from maximising the revenues, GSM would help them to acquire more customers. I am sure that they would want to leverage the power of GSM and CDMA networks and introduce consolidated billing. For example, they could offer wireless internet on CDMA and voice calls on GSM; some kind of a switching mechanism could be developed.
Unless Anil Ambani wants to call it quits and screw up. Who knows?
