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Airtel Wants Youtube To Be A Digital Billboard For Indian Music
Youtube is huge in India in terms of views and searches for programmable content. All the major broadcasters now have Youtube videos of their shows ready for the online crowd. They have understood that the reach of such a powerful online video service can give them the best outreach not just among the netizens in India but also abroad. Youtube has cracked a lot of content deals in the last few months and are already looking at new strategies to serve online content to users and be relevant in the long term.
Manan Kakkar from ZDnet reports that Airtel is trying to pitch the idea of an online music billboard to the search giant. Airtel is one of the largest mobile networks in India and have forayed into diverse digital services like DTH, Mobile broadband and IPTV in addition to its mobile business. With Google’s commitment to mobile Internet in India, Airtel pitch might just work out.
Vikrant Khanna, Vice President of Consumer Engagement and Digital at Airtel spoke to Ryan Hayward about the unique challenges Airtel faces in its homebase. Music, according to Vikrant, is the thing that every Internet savvy Indian goes to Youtube for. Here’s the particular part of the conversation that hints about Airtel and Google India’s discussions.
Q. Can you describe what one of these ‘activations’ looks like? How does a mobile communications provider convince youth that they enable their passions?
Vikrant Khanna: One example is using the mobile phone to bring music to the masses. For example, we are in discussions with Google to create on YouTube the first ‘billboard’ for the top music in the country. I believe that music constitutes around 50 percent of search queries on YouTube, so there’s a huge demand, but there’s not anywhere you can go on the web to see what the top music is right now in India. There’s no billboard that’s truly democratic and transparent. So we want to create that on a platform like YouTube where the music rating will be based on user views and popularity. After consuming the content, if the user wants, we would give them the functionality to download the song as a ringtone on their mobile phones.
This is very interesting since Youtube is already used as a music player by many people on the desktop by taking advantage of the playlist feature. The sole problem with all this is the fact that everyone (including Airtel) casually ignore the fact that India’s Internet connectivity can be called pathetic at best, compared to western countries. The 3G and 4G services are overpriced and will only be used in cities. It is really great that innovative services like Saavn and Gaana make online music a pleasurable experience but if there is really going to be a ‘democratic’ billboard, you will need the participation of a majority of a country’s population and not just that of some city.
What are your thoughts on this? Do share your views with us.
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