Google, FB and battle for offline internet in India
India is on its way to becoming the world’s largest offline network
NEW DELHI: It is a Monday afternoon in early July. Kumar and his friends, who work at an eating joint in Delhi’s Chittaranjan Park area, have just finished their afternoon chores. Kumar’s friends huddle around him, though the centre of their attraction, Kumar’s mobile phone, is not connected to the internet at the moment. Turns out Kumar is playing a video he had downloaded the previous night from Youtube, Google’s video sharing and streaming service.
The second-generation (2G) connection on Kumar’s phone is too slow to watch a video without buffering. “So, I always download it and watch it later, anytime in the next 48 hours,” he says.
Google charges advertising dollars when people consume its services online. That’s also why it backs the offline internet, which allows content available online to be consumed when not connected to the web. As more people watch the downloaded content, the advertisement, too, gets saved, from which Google makes its money.
The offline services are for people like Kumar, 26, a migrant worker from Bihar’s Motihari district who came to Delhi in 2003 in search of a job. That year, India’s internet user base was 18.6 million. Air Deccan had just started the country’s first online air ticketing site, and Airtel was starting its broadband services. The Mountain View-headquartered Google was not the household name in India it is today. Gmail, Orkut (Google’s social network killed by Facebook), and Youtube weren’t even born.
In the 13 years that followed, internet users have grown past that of the US, to 277 million. The future is even brighter — a fourth of the “next billion” users will come from here. “This is where most of our future users are going to be,” says Caesar Sengupta, vice-president of product management and the head of “the next billion” at Google.
Most of these users will be in the lowincome group, buying smartphones priced below ₹10,000 and working on Google’s Android operating system, connected to a much slower internet, but crazy about Bollywood and cricket.
“At times the connectivity is patchy, or you are away from Wi-fi, or you don’t want to spend money,” says Sengupta. The best way to get these users was to offer a mix of online-offline viewing.
The results are encouraging. Last year, Youtube’s offline content consumption grew six times.
Google also built similar features for Maps. When the connectivity dropped, the Maps still worked. That was critical in a country where the internet is particularly patchy while travelling, when maps would be most in use. India is now one of the top five countries to use it. Both offline Maps and Youtube were first launched in India, and later taken to other emerging countries.
California-based Facebook has taken a page from Google’s playbook. In July, it launched a pilot in India, which allows users to save videos and watch them later. “In markets such as India, mobile data and internet connectivity is limited and many people struggle with poor video experiences,” a Facebook spokesperson says.
The pilot is on a small percentage of Facebook’s 142 million India users, who can download videos when the connectivity is good, and view them later without using extra mobile data. But, only original videos posted by individuals can be downloaded.
Facebook believes 30% of its new users by 2020 will come from India. “People are coming online at a staggering rate in the emerging markets and, in most cases, on mobile,” the spokesperson says.
The growth of the offline internet is fast in video. “Nearly half of the data consumed in India is on video... Offline internet will get more users hooked to the real internet,” says Sanchit Vir Gogia, founder and chief analyst at Greyhound Research.
Before Google, Deepak Ravindran, founder of Innoz, created an offline search engine, SMSGYAN, in 2010. If a user texted a question, the software would crawl partner websites, such as Wikipedia, Bing and Wolfram Alpha for answers, and message back. As smartphones users have burgeoned, music streaming app Saavn, digital map maker Mapmyindia, news app Pocket, and auto aggregator Jugnoo, offer offline features.
But, the real fight, even offline, will be between Google and Facebook. For now, Google leads, and Sengupta may soon play his next move. Will it be Google’s offline search? “Nothing that I can comment on, but that’s interesting,” he says.