The mobisode gold rush is truly global. Almost every major Indian entertainment network has jumped on the mobisode bandwagon! First Star and MTV with a select few serials, and now, forever snapping at the heels of market leaders Star and Sony, Zee TV has announced that it would digitize over 50,000 hours of its programming, and explore mobisodes in a big way. From a certain perspective, I'm excited at all these changes. With IPTV, HDTV, mobile video, video on demand etc all poised to hit the market, Zee's efforts make imminent sense. However technology and digitizatgion are just one part of the equation. The other part is optimum utilization of the digitized content, and it is here where I fear that the Indian companies may falter. No one is doing any real research on what kind of content people want to consume, across all the exciting platforms. So, what is we threw a digital party, but nobody downloaded? I'm afraid that many of the Indian media company executives might be scratching their heads and wondering the answer to that soon enough. For now however, it's making hay time.
Read the Content Sutra coverage on Indian mobile entertainment related programming here.
