January - 2010 issue > Business

By Tarun Handa

1. Entertainment to Infotainment & Beyond

Today Entertainment category of VAS contributes the highest share in any Indian operators VAS portfolio. Bollywood today is the world’s largest entertainment industry, producing more than a 1000 movies a year with an audience of more than 2 billion viewers across 127 countries and the content demand is not only high in India but also overseas. Interestingly today’s mobile devices have shifted the entertainment from a content or network play to a device based play. Mobile devices with integrated music and video player, FM and high memory features have flooded the market accompanied with low cost associated with it. Entertainment content from the web world is being fed into the device memory and is being used. Even games for this case are downloaded from the web and dumped into devices.

In such an unfavorable scenario, the Operators are making a lot of investments in infotainment content and services. The demand for infotainment content and services like news, astrology, location based services, maps etc; have had a significant growth in the recent past and is expected to grow even more in future.

2. Focusing on Rural VAS

In emerging markets especially in countries like India, majority of the population is rural i.e. the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP). Rural teledensity in India was at 16.54 percent as of May 2009 compared to urban teledensity of more than 88.6 percent around the same period. This figure is expected to reach about 36.25 percent by 2013.

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