TekChakra.com

Rediff launched its Video, Music and Photo sharing site ishare, just last week and has gone on an advertising blitz to get the word out. Traffic to Rediff.com has been steadily declining over the past few months, and hopefully this will change things for Rediff.

Rediff is yet another Indian company that continues not to innovate and come up with unique Web2.0 models, but rather chooses the simpler path by copying successful Web2.0 models that have worked overseas. What I fail to understand is why Rediff took over 18 months to realize this. Also, I’m pretty sure they are using a ready-to-go off-the-shelf white label solution called KickApps, so a delay could not have been attributed to development time. Perhaps, it was a legal angle to the business model …and Rediff wanted to see how Google and Yahoo would play out the lawsuits being filed by consumers towards their video content. Even if so, its just taken too long for an Internet company to react and decide - this move should’ve been made months ago (probably a year ago) - and perhaps then there was some chance for the NRI and Indian crowd thats hooked on Youtube to visit Rediff.

How ishare will increase traffic numbers, is yet to be seen - but my guess is that there will be a few small blips in the traffic charts - but nothing significant. Youtube is already filled with a vast sea of Indian content - and also has a large number of Indians and NRIs uploading and commenting on videos, making the community truly bubbly. Rediff Videos on the other hand barely had a handful of comments posted amongst over 700 videos… with 99% of videos having no comments at all. There are also many copyright infringing videos, and I wonder if Rediff has opened up a whole new can of worms for itself, by not policing the uploaded content before it goes live - but rather to work under the shelter of the US law - whereby the site owners are not responsible for user generated content - unless they are notified of infringing content, thereafter which they are required to pull it off within 24 hours. The Indian Cyber Law will probably not give the shelter to Rediff, and its only a matter of time until lawsuits start rolling in. Rediff joins other Indian video sharing websites, such as MeraVideo, VideoDubba and Apnatube that have been around for around 8 to 9 months now. In another story, Sify has also launched city specific video websites with downloadable video content - ChennaiLive.in, MumbaiLive.in and BangaloreLive.in

It is my opinion that Indian mass market is more a video watching crowd, than creators and directors. Video camcorders are still relatively expensive to purchase and the ratio of creators and Video uploaders is just going to be too low and negligible for any original content to be uploaded onto Rediff. Most of the videos that are on Rediff are clips from professionally shot videos - movies, TV shows, Cricket matches etc… and almost no individually created content appears. Almost 100% of the videos are already found on Youtube and ther other Indian video sharing sites - so I dont really see this as a steroid-ically virally growing site like Youtube, or a “potentially disruptive model” - as one of Rediff’s executives has quoted.

— Vishal Lamba    Filed under: Uncategorized