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Toronto: It's an Angel's work once again. Ray Newal founded Jigsee, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from the Indian Angel Network. The company is betting on a market, which is in its nascent stage but will be a boom in next few years - mobile video streaming. Globally, in the first half of 2010, video streaming was the single largest application worldwide and it grew by 92 percent from the last half of 2009, driving an overall increase of 68 percent in mobile data bandwidth utilization. "Our goal is to foster an environment that makes the mobile phone a great place to watch video content. To my knowledge, this has yet to exist in India or most other countries," says Newal in a futuristic tone.
The company has been of great interest among the venture firms, as it eyed a big bite of video streaming from the emerging nations. Ray promptly continues, "We've had significant interest from many funders in the Indian market since we arrived here in 2009. Our objective was to raise the money from a group that could help us achieve our objectives in the short term, while at the same time providing us with access to palatable options for future financing. Through the IAN we've found that balance." The company earlier in 2010 raised from another consortium of Angel investors and one among them was Graham Matthews, President and CEO of Upper Canada Ventures.
The main merit is the experience of the co-founders Ray Newal and Gordon Jekubik. The former was the Vice President of Business Development and Content Acquisition at Yahoo! Canada, and , the latter was the Chief Financial Officer at Microsoft Canada. Their industry experience helped them to identify the most unexplored market - video streaming in emerging economies.
Consumers have demonstrated an appetite for rich media on phones here in India, and hence, a streaming solution centred on quality of service will benefit from this. Moreover, video content owners too express a demand for distribution to a wider audience than current streaming solutions permit. Operators are trying to generate more revenues from data consumption, however, the options are limited as majority of Indians have the basic handsets instead of the heavy featured smartphones. The market has been restricted to light-data VAS, and it consequently became used to this restricted form of entertainment. This is where Newal's Jigsee is trying to leverage on. "Offering accessibility to basic devices, over 2.5G networks allows us to break through the entertainment limitations and we give operators an opportunity to engage people using heavier content, delivered in a bandwidth efficient manner," says Ray. Jigsee chose to support the more basic devices first, by developing applications for the j2me platform. A result of this is their ability to make video streaming a possibility on even entry-level phones. In this segment of the device market where features become commoditized, we can offer a significant USP to our partners.
It's a huge unexplored market as ultimately it's going to be tangential to markets such as DTH, mobile entertainment VAS, and mobile/internet advertising. Currently, the company has no such competitors who deals in the same realm, but they see a bigger threat to convert the DTH, Cable and YouTube addicts into mobile video streaming addicts. They have to cautiously step in with well-set market penetrating plans and the recently raised amount will help in the same. The company is on its way to expand more in the country starting with their India head quarters in Mumbai. They would hire on the product development side, and also build teams that will foster relationships with content and distribution partners.
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