Dilip Venkatraman sheds light on delivering smart content on the small screen

India has conventionally been a single-screen household. The complete family used to get together in front of one television screen to watch the monologue content. This makes it difficult to get the viewers’ uninterrupted attention when there are hundreds of channels running 24x7. It implies that one or more members of the family are sacrificing on their choice of content. Almost every family member has a personal screen now, thanks to the smartphone.

India sells around 135-140 million Smartphones a year according to CMR’s Mobilytiks across various states. Every year, there are between 1,100 and 1,400 models of various Smartphone brands consumed in India.

While the phones are smart, the screens are much smaller in comparison to TV’s, Desktops and Laptops.  While, a lot of content look fabulous on big screens, but when it comes to small screens it looks unappealing. Hence it is vital that video content, as well as the player, is responsive for which the app needs to have a platform and device agnostic.

Globally, the video consumption on the smaller screen is here to stay as young user consumption plays a key role in driving the format’s growth. According to the latest Video Index from Ooyala, video content resulted in more video starts (56%), with smartphones accounting for 45% of all plays, ahead of desktops at 44% and tablets at 11%. Millennials are seen as the largest consumer group of mobile video with a reach of 60% on smartphones. However, older generations have begun to purchase smartphones and are increasing video consumption numbers steadily.

For quite a while, the world has been moving towards “smart everything” such as Smartphones, Smart gadgets, smart cars and more. Lifestyles are reshaping with smart tech while there is an app for making every activity convenient and easier, for optimal usage in a world of smartphones, it is necessary to be a “Smart-app”.

Consumers who are using smartphones need smart technology led apps which would make the best use of the smartphone and its smart features. Also, with the surge of smartphones, consumers are controlling their user experiences as well as viewing experiences.  

While watching HD content on TV is a great experience, how does one ensure the same content is consumed with a similar experience on a smaller screen? The answer is to give the consumers a  non-linear experience and moving them from a passive to an active experience.  

Hence, we at VideoTap have created an app backed by a platform to complete the ecosystem keeping in mind the smarter generation, smartphones, and most importantly smaller screens. Everything is possible on a smartphone with just with a tap. So we have personalized videos for the smartphone users ensuring that they get access to any video or any part of the video by just tapping on interactive menus/options. We have fully leveraged the advantage of smart screens, by developing an app, which utilizes each and every feature of a smartphone and helps consumers navigate seamlessly within and outside of a video while keeping the chain of the content intact.

 We have built exciting features into our offering, which results in longer viewing and personalized content consumption. With our app’s enhanced video abilities, consumers can skip content easily, discover relevant content effectively and view smartly. Our aim is to ensure that the interactive options given on any video are neither annoying nor cluttered.  Fragmentation and segmentation of videos is an added flavor while consuming any videos curated using VideoTap, our platform.

Overall, the future of smart video consumption is full of opportunities for content creators, advertisers, marketer and most importantly, the consumers. Smart video consumption will disrupt the current mechanism of the video content industry, empowering the consumers to have control over content consumption and viewership.

(Dilip Venkatraman is the Founder of VideoTap, one of its kind Interactive Smart Video Platform that delivers Dynamic Personalised Interactive Videos on Demand in real time).

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not reflect those of Adgully.

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