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The digital studio boom in India: will it pay off? By Venkatesha Babu
Here's a not-so-loony tale: India is emerging as a big digital animation centre of the world and by 2005 could be raking in several hundred million dollars. Pentamedia Graphics, the Chennai-based digital animation major, has already done work for well-acclaimed animated movies like 'Pandavas---The Five Warriors', and 'Sinbad---Beyond the Veil of Mists', and will shortly release another one called the 'The Story of Buddha'. But it's not just Pentamedia Graphics that's raking in the digital dollars. A host of other companies such as GDR Multimedia, Digital Studios, Phoenix Global Solutions, and Compudyne Winfosys have either already set up or are in the process of setting up their digital studios. All of them are eyeing the special effects, graphic designs, and 3-D animation movies that are in great demand internationally. "The entertainment industry-comprising feature films, ad films, and music albums-accounts for 80 per cent of the multimedia usage world wide. And the market is growing at 60 per cent annually," says G. Dhananjaya Reddy, Managing Director, GDR Multimedia. Currently, Reddy's studio is working on a Tamil movie called 'Samurai', which will have nearly eight minutes of special effects. Others like Phoenix Global Solutions have done substantial amount of work in a short time. Phoenix says it has produced four titles so far and is working on more. Digital Studios claims to be a one-stop shop for special effects, graphic design, computer animation, and post-production requirements. Most of these companies have entered into tie-ups with international companies to market their services. For instance, Pentamedia has a tie-up with Stan Lee Media of the US, 3Dmaxmedia, and New Media Venture Partners (among others); and GDR has a relationship with US-based Ecelleration.com. Unlike conventional software services, where India has an advantage because of the cost of labour, digital animation is one sector where technical skills and innovativeness count ahead of cost. Says K. Srinivasan, Chief Operating Officer of Pentamedia: "The market is pretty big and there is more than enough business going around for all of us." If it sounds like a fairy tale, it's because it almost is. Cyberworld Gets Mobile India's first mobile portal, miZone.com, kicks off. By Roop Karnani On October 31, BPL Mobile launched India's first WAP-enabled mobile internet portal, www.miZone.bplmobile.com. Now, not only mobile phone subscribers having WAP phones can access this portal anytime, anywhere, but also mobile phone owners, whose phones are SMS-enabled can, access most of the services on miZone. Within a week of its launch in Mumbai, the portal was also launched in the rest of Maharashtra and Goa, which will be followed, by a launch in Tamil Nadu and Kerala in the next two weeks. This means more than half-a-million BPL-subscribers will have access to this site. Besides, WAP phone users in other networks can also access this site. Of course, it can be accessed from a computer too. Says Vinay Agarwal, 40, COO, BPL Mobile (Maharashtra): "The portal is configured into three zones---miInfoZone, miCommerceZone, and miFunZone." The info zone has various services such as news, weather, and e-mail (which is called mimail). For instance, if a person is a regular reader of a business daily and wants to have the headlines of other papers as well, he can program his WAP phone accordingly and get the headlines flashed on his mobile every morning at a particular time. Mimail, which Agarwal claims is the first e-mail service on a mobile phone in the world, allows you to receive and send e-mails not only on your mobile, but also on your computer simultaneously. The commerce zone allows one to do banking with HDFC and ICICI Bank, which includes checking your personal account balance, ordering cheques and drafts. It also has stockmarket quotes. Says Agarwal: "You can program your mobile phone to give you an alert, if say, the Infosys scrip crosses a certain upper or lower limit. This can be done for any number of shares." miFunZone has cartoons, jokes, horoscopes, over a hundred musical tunes, which include Hindi film tunes, rock, and jazz. And the cellphone can be programmed to ring in one of these hundreds of tunes. For the business executive, miZone has features like miScheduler, which has a 'to do' list, reminders of dates, meetings, anniversaries, and birth dates. Explains Agarwal: "You can not only program your mobile to remind you of a meeting, but also remind the other person who is going to participate in that meeting." Right now, access to this portal is free. The e-mail services are also free. Each mobile subscriber also gets his own personal homepage on the website and the only charge that the subscriber has to pay to log on to the Net is the air-time fee. This, Agarwal hopes, will lead to a significant increase in revenue as more and more people log on to the Net from their mobile phones. His estimate is that by the end of 12 months, there should be at least a 5 per cent increase in the revenue due to these value-added services. |
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