Reliance Entertainment Digital CEO Manish Agarwal is pretty excited about his company’s date with MipCom this year. Says he: “We want to understand the market and its offering and how relevant it is for the digital business. We are always in search of some interesting and innovative content.”
For Agarwal, who is into content publishing, participation in Mipcom is likely to become an integral part of doing business, though his company is participating in it for the first time.
“It gives us an opportunity to explore the large variety of content which we need for the various platforms like BigFlix, Zapak etc. We will obviously focus on networking with more content providers and aggregators across the globe,” says he.
Reliance Entertainment Digital which launched its over the top (OTT) service BigFlix last year is sorted in terms of Indian programming and now wants add on international content in more genres and languages.
“We want to expand our offerings to the consumer. Participating in Mipcom will help us explore more opportunities,” he says.
We want to expand our offerings to the consume and participating in Mipcom will help us explore more opportunities believes Manish Agarwal
Agarwal says that an increasing group of young Indian consumers is gorging on digitised content on hand held devices and on their PCs. “It is essential for Indian service providers to experiment with new type of content across genres and content-types. And it is just not that Indians will consume only trailers or paparazzi content, they will also look at different content and so we want to explore with a variety of content,” he highlights.
The focus this year at Mipcom he emphasises will be on acquiring entertainment content – especially that which originates from English speaking nations or with English subtitles.
“This will be entertainment for English speaking audiences, entertainment for masses and for kids. This is the reason we are going not only for Mipcom, but also for Mip Junior,” he informs.
For those visiting Mipcom to sell gaming content, expect the Reliance Entertainment
representative at your stall. “We will also look at gaming content or gaming IPs on which games can be created. So we are aiming at kids entertainment both in gaming and VOD content which caters to everyone or in niche segments in the country,” says he. “In terms of gaming IPs, since we are present across the globe, we will go for any IP which is popular. So we will be hunting for any IP across different markets in order to get a license to create mobile games
The OTT service which delivers its content online to connected devices – a la NetFlix in the US - is looking at stacking up its video-on-demand (VOD) menu. “This can subsume movies-on-demand, TV-serials-on-demand and animations-on-demand. And for gaming again we are looking at the mobile platforms.”
And the company is shopping cheque book in hand. So sellers will indeed be kept busy by this emerging digital giant from India.
