Atul Madan, Senior Vice-President, Digital Services, Mahindra Comviva’s views on how the global content space is evolving and what strategies companies should adopt.
Trends observed over the past year in the global content and music space
If we look at the content industry as such, in the last few years quite a few changes have happened over the quite few years and consumption of content over digital media is going rapidly and is expected to go beyond physical media this year.
Streaming is expected to touch $3 billion this year. Traditionally downloads have been the major revenue but streaming is catching up fast now and the valuation the company is getting is all around streaming services.
Significant trends
There are three typical trends which are quite relevant whether it is Mahindra Comviva or any other company is into content space today. Another aspect is personalization of services, what we have seen people who are looking for services consume more content than people who are not offered a personalized service.
So it is very important for us to deliver services in that context, personalized and relevant for the consumer. That is one area we will be focusing on a lot.
Second aspect to consider is, especially in music space is piracy music. How will the rightful owner get the rightful share so at Mahindra Comviva we make sure that id’s are protected, proper validation, the owners get the rightful share. That is an important aspect and what we have seen is especially in markets like Africa, Asian sub-continent, piracy has to be addressed and once this is addressed the content providers will be really interested in providing services. That is what we are focusing upon on. Another aspect we have seen is quite a few operators are pretty good but they don’t have the exposure across geographies, highly localized.
At Mahindra Comviva we are working with the artists, providing a much wider canvas, giving them a platform to be able to offer them content across countries, across operators, we have done fairly successful in that experiment. Specially in Africa, we look at the content partners who predict, provide content in specific country, specific geography.
At Mahindra Comviva, spanning 125 countries we are able to provide them much wider platform for them to be able to offer there content to various subscribers.
Strategic roadmap to be adopted by companies
The company strategy is product and business strategy.
If we look at Business strategy as such, then there are three major areas, enabling content partners, being able to distribute there content using our reach, we have 25+ operators in Africa. We are planning to increase the reach to 50+ over 20 to 24 months.
Second area,we are looking at other than music as we see devotional content is enriching for people. There likelihood is very high and what we have seen a lot of people in Africa who are not able to go and attend regular church. So we are working with various religious partners who are able to provide content so that consumer can listen to. And in this context we have already tied up with few partners, Church partners have come together with us, also the Islamic content that we have been able to collect and we are now planning to distribute that content across Africa.
Third is, we would like to be the content distribution partner across Africa and while we are quite hopeful, is that we worked in all the major operators in Africa.
If we look at the content strategy, we are putting in space the content distribution platform, wherein any partner can join with ease, how is content consumed, we are planning to put that in place.
Offering to increase that.
Final note
What we are doing today is working to enable the content industry, to distribute their content through our solutions. Our connectivity with operators, bringing together operators and target industry to provide rich content to the subscribers and that is what we believe and that is what we are working towards.
