Following a commercial trial in northern India, Zee TV is readying a national rollout of its ISee mobile TV platform on BSNL’s GPRS/EDGE network from mid February. The planned monthly subscription is below the Rs. 100 mark, inclusive of all data charges.

 Launched in July 2007, ISee has initally seen pick-up in Chandigarh and Jaipur. Independence Day last year saw a surge of requests to download the application—no less than 550--and 4 months ago, hardware was put in place for a rollout to BSNL’s eastern node of Kolkata. Chennai and Pune, the hubs for BSNL’s southern and western circles will be kitted out towards the end of March. 

Each node serves seven to eight mobile circles and the plan is to pervade BSNL’s 21 telecom circles by the end of the quarter, with the aim of streaming into 20% of BSNL’s GPRS subscriber base by the second quarter of 2008.

Zee led the charge of middle-brow entertainment to a TV viewership dominated by a staid Doordarshan in the early 80s. It now boasts a library of more than 30,000 hours of original programming. Digitised by an IBM-based Digital Asset Management system, these have become the rich pickings for its re-purposed mobile content platform.

 As India’s Number Two TV channel, Zee TV has had to work harder than the frontrunner, Star TV, to capture eyeball share in the digital domain. It found a certain synergy with BSNL, who, as India’s Number Three mobile operator, was scrambling to supplement dwindling revenue from fixed and mobile voice.

According to ISee’s project head, Satyabrata Das, the channel employs a dedicated staff of ten to edit and reformat television ‘software’ as it is known in the trade, into clipped versions for the mobile screen. Another 20 are employed in various marketing, operational and research roles.

 While it was aggressive enough to jump right into rich media, Zee chose a cautious path into the market, partnering with state-owned BSNL, rather than going with its own multi-operator shortcode or seeking content alliances.