What happens when three youngsters--one from television, another from the internet and the third from fashion and television--come together? You get Nautanki.TV, an online entertainment channel that caters to Indians all over the world. It was a real TV channel that Vikram Prabhu, Sunil Nair and Herumb Khot had set out to launch last year, before they realised that they would need at least Rs 300 crore to do so. So raising Rs 1 crore from two I-banker friends (the trio chipped in with Rs 50 lakh), they did the next best thing: launch an online TV.
Nautanki.TV went online eight months ago with six channels, including drama, thrillers, documentaries, and humour. The online TV webcasts a fixed schedule of programmes every day. “We have half hour of fresh programming every day. By end of March, we expect this go up to one hour and by June to two hours,” says Nair. Currently, 70 per cent of the content is produced in-house, while amateurs contribute the rest. The content is free to view, and the website makes money the traditional way—from advertisers on a pay per view basis. “For a 30-second commercial we charge Rs 25 per view,” says Nair.
All programmes on Nautanki.TV are typically 4-minute long, with a maximum duration of eight minutes. The website gets 75,000 visitors every day, and 40 per cent of the traffic comes from the UK and the US. The promoters are now planning to launch a Gujarati channel that will be generic in nature with news, current affairs and cultural programmes. “We are looking to extend our regional coverage then to launching Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali and Kannada channels,” says Prabhu. Needless to say, Nautanki.TV plans to tap VCs for funds in June this year.
This article was also first published in Business Today, authored by Anusha Subramanian and was later picked up by Business World. Business Today rated it as among the top 10 hot start-ups of 2007
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3 comments:
Should that "300 crores" be read as "300 lacs" ??
300 crores (US $ 75 mio) is a large sum of money..
Shankar
hey I heared this nautanki.tv is all a "set up"........my friend runs a internet consulting firm and he recruited a girl for nautanki.tv...apparently the girl was pregnant
and the guys of nautanki.tv knew that she was pregnant. Till 3 months they made the girl work~~~every thing was going perfectly fine...but when it came to paying my friend
(who actually recruited her) they said that we are firing that girl since she is very inefficient. They didnt pay my friend a single penny. Such a thing is completely totally unacceptable.
How can CEO be so insensitive????? This is such an unethical firm.....I hope people stay away from it~~~
@rambhai
thats a sad thing to do. i protest this move by the ceo
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