Cost of Mobile Distribution Could Drive Content Creators to Other Media, Warns Viren Popli of Star TV

Expect few new announcements from Star TV’s new media division this quarter. Jokes Star India’s senior vice president, mobile entertainment, Viren Popli, “We are desperately trying to get out of the holes we dug for ourselves last year.” These include a host of 2007 initiatives including the launch of the GPRS portal Plus and related agreements with Fox News and Sony Ericsson.

Popli has been associated with Star TV since 2000 and was on the team that launched the original “Kaun Banega Crorepati?” The interactive division that he was chosen to head up since 2005 also is a barometer of the evolving mobile content industry:  Star is emerging from the chrysalis of interactive SMS to become a purveyor of original content for a new medium. 

 Industry-wide, there a few game-changing initiatives going on at the moment in the domain of mobile content. News is still spun around more of the same: principally, ring-back tones and acquiring Bollywood rights for the fourth screen. And that’s likely to be the scenario till the cost of mobile VAS remains at current levels. 

Made for mobile content is a segment that has been touted by growth-mongers. How fast it sells depends on factors outside the broadcast houses’ control. “It all depends on when the pipe becomes thicker,” says Popli, who is willing to consider wi-fi, wimax, 3G, any alternative to the “fraud broadband that we are faced with every evening when surfing.”

“Today, we are in the dial-up era of high-speed mobile. The equivalent of where the Internet was before Mozilla, Napster and YouTube became possible.”

But how willing are users to pay for content over their mobiles, which they can get free on the internet?

The question, according to Popli, should be how much are they willing to pay? The current state of the mobile content business is akin to the agricultural commodities business, according to Popli. The real price of the content is that purchased from the producer, the rest is mark-ups along the way. India’s mobile operators are known to retain 70 to 80% of the revenues from value-added services after service taxes are paid to DOT.

The issue, to Popli, is not the revenue split between producer and distributor of the content, but the cost of distribution, which begs the question, “is mobile the distribution medium I should be using?”