Rajjat Barjatya wants toride the virtual wave withthe Rajshri brand. He tellsG Sampath about the big splash he expects to make.
As the 32-year-old Harvard-returned scion of the Rajshri group, Rajjat A Barjatya has a lot going for him, namely money, freedom, and a flourishing family business that is ready to back his entrepreneurial vision, even when it entails venturing into virgin territory.
This is not something you’d normally expect from a crusty old film family such as Rajshri, now busy reinventing itself as an ‘integrated entertainment company’. Founded in 1947 by Barjatya’s grandfather, Tarachand, it is one of India’s oldest and largest film distributors. Over time, it got into film production — churning out cloyingly sweet but highly successful family entertainers dripping with ‘traditional values’, most recently Vivah — TV serials and the music business.
What Barjatya looks after is the newly sprouted digital arm of Rajshri Media. At the core of his business is rajshri.com, one of India’s first broadband video websites. Barjatya’s mission, which he explains to you with the fervour of an evangelist, is to revolutionise entertainment through the digital medium the way television revolutionised mass entertainment — by prising it out of the grip of the large screen and bringing it into everyone’s life through the smallest of interfaces.
“We want to be a company that can reach out to you through the four screens in your life: cinema, PC, Mobile, TV,” says the man with the digital plan. And his medium of choice is the mobile. “You go to the cinema perhaps once a week. You’re in front of the TV maybe two hours a day and the PC for about eight hours. But the mobile in your hand, for me, is an entertainment device that is with you 24x7. It has immense potential.”
Tapping this potential is central to Barjatya’s business. For instance, he’ll create a three-minute comedy video for the mobile. You buy it off his website and watch it on your mobile. If it flies high it could be developed into a mobile game, a television serial, or, given Rajshri’s film infrastructure, even a film.
Barjatya describes his business with elegant simplicity: “content creation, content aggregation and content distribution across new media such as the internet and telephone networks”.
“We have no idea what might work, or how long it should be, or what genre we should focus on,” he explains. “It’s like producing the first TV serial. In a theatre you have a captive audience for, say, three hours. On TV the audience has a shorter attention span, but the norm has been set at about 30 minutes to an hour. For the internet or mobile, nobody knows. Perhaps three minutes, maybe five. Humour may probably work or maybe it will be reality-based programming. We are the first in this space, we’re experimenting, and we’ll find out.”
Barjatya’s target group is the global non-resident Indian community of about 25 million; there’s also a further 30 million who consume Indian entertainment on a regular basis. “We’re looking at a global audience of about 60 million,” he says.
As for revenue models, he has two of them. The first is ad-supported free streaming, or the ‘TV model’. You go to rajshri.com and click on a film you want to see. Before the film starts playing, and maybe even in the middle of it, a few video ads will be streamed to you. You watch the film for free, but the advertiser pays Rajshri for the number of times the ad is streamed.
The second is transaction-based, or the ‘DVD model’. So, if you want to watch a film, you pay, download it and watch it ad-free.
Barjatya is convinced the net gives “more bang for the buck” to advertisers. For instance, you can target your audience better. A TV viewer has to see the Gillette ad and the Stayfree ad. Here, if you are a man the Gillette ad will be streamed to you, and if you are woman you’ll get only the Stayfree commercial.
Ultimately, the engine driving Barjatya’s business is not so much the content itself but its strategic ‘repurposing’ for different mediums, so that a single viewing opportunity can yield multiple revenue opportunities.
Let’s say, you go to rajshri.com to watch Hum Aapke Hain Kaun (HAHK). There is revenue from the ad or the download (depending on how you watch it). After you watch the movie, you’re tempted to set Didi Tera Devar Deewana as your ring tone, and so you buy it (more money from your pocket).
Next, you like the jacket Salman Khan wore in the film, so you purchase it from the site (another transaction). Then you want to play the HAHK mobile game, so you download it (yet another purchase). Then you remember that you want to learn the recipe of the special bhendi masala prepared by Madhuri Dixit in the film. So you click into the food section, where, for a price, a celebrity chef will demonstrate to you how to make that starry bhendi masala.
You make bhendi masala, even eat it and, glowing with the satisfaction of 360-degrees consumption, come back to spend more time — and money — at rajshri.com. At least, that’s what Barjatya is betting you will do.
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