<FONT COLOR="#FF0033"><B>FICCI Frames ’06:</B></FONT> Is India ready for the digital content wave?

Everyone’s talking about the advent of digital content and how it is ready to take over on mobile phones, television, computers and various other media. Two digital content models are already doing rather well. The first is the B2B (business to business) digitisation model such as content delivery from a central location to a cinema hall. Then, there’s the C2C (consumer to consumer) model, such as e-mail, messengers on the Internet, mobile phones and SMS, to name a few.

But there’s a third model, the B2C (business to consumer), which is where the real challenge of digital content lies. This includes content offered by broadband, or even content such as movies, supplied on mobile phones. This theory was put forward by Viren Popli, senior vice-president, STAR India, at FICCI Frames 2006.

According to Popli, there are three stakeholders in the B2C model of the digital content delivery process: the consumers, content owners and content delivery guys.

“The consumer today is quite confused with so many options opening up for him in the digital space,” Popli said. “Therefore, the challenge lies in creating content in a language that is understood by the consumer, considering the fact that India is a multilingual country.” This is especially so because only 18 per cent of content is consumed in the English language by Indian consumers.

The issues for the content owners, according to Popli, are many. Some of these are piracy, the cost of digitisation, which is very high, cost of delivery, legal and rights issues, creating new content all the time and standardisation of formats such as MP3 or videos.

For the delivery people (the owners of pipes), the problem lies in deciding which technology to choose, what it will cost to roll it out, government regulations on digitisation and the fear that the technology chosen today may become obsolete tomorrow.

TN Prabhu, director, Walt Disney Internet Group India, said that while these issues are being sorted out, the biggest problem lies in the mindset of the content provider. “When one says the word digital, a content guy automatically equates it with interactivity,” Prabhu said. According to him, this myth that the consumer wants interactivity in everything needs to be broken, as the Indian consumer is largely used to ‘passive entertainment’.”

“We Indians may want interactivity in online gaming or on a show such as ‘KBC’ or even cricket,” he said. “But we will not tolerate interactivity in each and every show, such as popular soaps on television.”

Clearly, there’s a lot of ground to be covered before one thinks that digital content has arrived fully in India.

© 2006 agencyfaqs!