Rajshri’s revamped website, launched on 10 November, 2006 along with the release of its home production film Vivah, has reportedly served four million video streams in the space of a fortnight.
www.rajshri.com, riding high on the box office success of Vivah, both at home and overseas, appears to have done well for itself. But the site’s content, currently available free of cost (except for the Vivah download) hasn’t raked in the moolah as anticipated by Rajshri Media managing director Rajjat Barjatya.
The site currently offers more than 3,000 hours of full length Indian movies, music videos, TV shows, short films, documentaries and other premium programming. According to Rajshri Media, the content is being scaled up rapidly and the website will soon introduce content on spirituality, yoga, recipes, astrology and numerology.
A distinctive factor will be its soon-to-be-announced original video programming, conceived and produced for distribution via new media to digitally connected consumers worldwide.
Rajshri Media has appointed Limelight Networks as its exclusive provider of streaming content delivery services for Rajshri.com. The company says it will utilise Limelight’s global, high-performance network to deliver its vast library of full length Indian movies, music videos, TV shows, documentaries, and other premium video content via the Internet to a global audience.
Rajjat Barjatya says, “The non-resident Indian audience is estimated at more than 25 million, with an equally strong non-Indian audience. This audience is fragmented and difficult to reach through traditional media but connects very strongly with Indian entertainment, especially Bollywood. The penetration of broadband and 3G networks, especially in developed markets, gives us the ability to distribute rich content, including long form video, to consumers worldwide, including markets which traditional media has not been able to penetrate.”
Limelight Networks vice president, Asia-Pacific Matthew H Sturgess adds, “To make Rajshri’s vision a reality, our highly scalable next generation content delivery network enables them to simultaneously deliver huge video files, including feature films that are over three hours long, to audiences of any size, anywhere in the world.”