‘UTV Indiagames is the first company to reach 100 mn downloads in the Nokia Store’

What is the current market share of DisneyUTV Digital? How has your company performed with respect to your competitors in the last fiscal?

The Walt Disney Company India recently announced the restructuring of the company’s digital assets under DisneyUTV Digital in order to drive better growth in games, video, and audio services across mobile, online, and interactive TV. In gaming, we have a majority market share in the country today and two large impending deals are expected to further consolidate our market share.

Given the surge in mobile data connectivity including 3G and the expected 4G launches, we see the time ripe to increase our focus on video as a strategic growth driver. The breadth of portfolio is huge with content ranging from UTV content—Bollywood and regional movies, broadcasting, Disney content, and original content created especially for the digital audience. The audio business, even though in the midst of a few macro environment challenges, remains a segment that we believe has significant headroom for growth.

How has the company grown in the Indian VAS space?

Our business has been growing ahead of market and with the coming together of the audio, video, and games businesses, we expect to catalyze growth at a different scale going forward.

In terms of innovation, what are your key achievements?

DisneyUTV’s Digital teams innovate and deliver unique cross platform and cross media digital experiences focused on entertaining the Indian digital audiences across age groups.

Previous successes from the Disney and UTV teams in India include several innovative and popular products in the country including ‘audio cinema’, ‘Divya Kathayein’, ‘digital studio’, ‘sponsored

managing director, digital, DisneyUTV

tweets’, successful mobile games such as ‘Aladdin’, ‘DLF IPL Cricket’, ‘Cricket Fever’ with over 20 mn downloads, ‘Ra.One Genesis’ and ‘Club Penguin’, the #1 virtual world for children in the country as well.

UTV Indiagames is the first company in the world to reach 100 mn downloads in the Nokia store.

What is your strategy to overcome the challenge of price sensitiveness in the Indian Market?

India is price sensitive—is half-truth and almost a myth. Consumers demand value and are more driven by convenience of payment options vs pricing per se. Simply put, the users are quite willing to pay if (i) the payment methodology is convenient and (ii) if there are flexible payment plans. Clear evidence of the latter exists with the plethora of pricing options that consumers are offered by telcos themselves—clearly they see that works for them.

Another clear case in point is the significant consumption of entertainment services when one looks at it with the correct filters. Leading telcos already have about 13-15% revenues from data—if you exclude SMS that still leaves about 7-9% revenues from data services. When one looks at this from the perspective that only about 20-25% of the base is data connected, it speaks volumes of consumer intent to consume VAS.

What are the challenges that the VAS industry is facing at large?

There are a few challenges to combat in the mobile entertainment space:

The mobile ecosystem is currently in a state of chaos as the market is oversized with too many players and no real consolidation.

There is a need to innovate—not only in terms of launching new products but also to improvising and innovating the existing products in the market.

Monetization is clearly a problem and this has two facets—payments and ticket size of payments.

Currently, there is a limited adoption of payments outside of telecom billing and secondly, we need to continually offer innovative pricing options to the users.

How have your products helped service providers increase their revenues?

Currently the overwhelming majority of payments in VAS are routed through the telecom operators. So our growth and growth in VAS overall is symbiotic to growth in service provider revenues.

The VAS players need to delink partially from the operator and start focusing on non-operator business in a big way. Do you have any plans or solutions on those lines?

A few players in the market including us have been doing this for a while. We do not expect any course correction here.