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Seventymm.com, an online movie rental company, has received funding of Rs 50 crore from NEA-Indo US Ventures, a venture capital firm based in Bengaluru and the US. Vani Kola, managing director of NEA-Indo US Ventures, will join the Seventymm.com board.
This is the third time that Seventymm.com has received venture capital funding. Other venture capital firms which have invested in it are Matrix Partners India, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and ePlanet Ventures.
Speaking to afaqs!, Subhanker Sarker, chief operating officer, Seventymm.com, says, “We will be spending the money raised from funding on branding activities, content acquisition and expanding our presence in the country.”
The company has already hired Rediffusion DY&R Kolkata to manage its branding activities. Sarker says, “We have a budget of Rs 8 crore for this financial year to carry out marketing activities across various media. We will be launching a two month long campaign, which may include television, radio, Internet and mobile marketing.”
He adds, “Although we are serving multilingual markets, our marketing campaign will be primarily in English and Hindi. We may use local languages in our campaigns in certain locations.”
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It is also using viral and SMS marketing to create awareness about the brand. Gingersoft Media, which runs the permission based mobile advertisement service called mGinger, handles the mobile marketing initiatives of Seventymm.com.
In content, Seventymm.com will introduce movie streaming and downloading services in 2009. It is planning to diversify beyond movies. Sarker says, “We will remain focused on movies, but we will start offering other content, too. TV serials in both English and local languages will have a huge potential.” Sarker indicates that they are talking to TV channels to acquire TV based content.
Seventymm.com has already started renting of edutainment based content, which Sarker says works best during vacations. It has also tied up with Microsoft to rent out Xbox game CDs.
The company owns 18,000 movie titles, of which 40 per cent are in English, 30 per cent in Hindi and the remaining 30 per cent in different local languages such as Bengali, Marathi, Bhojpuri, Telugu, Malayalam and Punjabi.
Seventymm.com caters to 70,000 subscribers in six cities and is planning to expand its base to four million subscribers in the next five years. It will start offering its services in Kolkata, Pune and Ahmedabad by the end of 2008 and cover the top 40 cities of India by the end of 2009. There are no plans to open retails outlets as of now.
Apart from Seventymm.com, NEA-Indo US Ventures has invested in 15 Indian companies across different domains such as retail, knowledge and business process outsourcing, and digital media. It also invested in Gingersoft Media in 2007.
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