Y.Sunita Chowdhary
What to watch? Where to watch? Go to Tharun Bhascker’s Bingeit. A social media platform, where you get updated information of all the films on OTT with recommendations and short reviews by users. Speaking to Klapboardpost.com, Tharun Bhascker who has a stake in this movie recommendation app says, “Social networks are all over the place. We use Instagram and Twitter for personal purposes, films, politics and news sharing. There is no dedicated app where we can discuss movies, particularly a one stop shop to know what is happening in OTT, to know what is trending in public opinion. We do plan to have short films eventually, any kind of content here. This is a great solution I felt but I didn’t have time and resources to develop it. Every person in America has a TV guide. Today we are in some sort of chaos, with so many apps that don’t link to Google. Some OTT apps aren’t yet updated or discovered by Google. Like we have Zomato for food, we need Bingeit for OTT platforms.”
Two friends Sai Kiran with the same name contacted Tharun Bhascker on Gmail and the start up took off. They actually have a lot of start ups and when they had this, they encountered a huge problem that had to be solved. They showed it to Tharun and they added and deleted features and finally felt they could push it out. Talking about its relevance in today’s world he says it has a huge potential to grow. “Everyone is coming up with their own OTT in the industry, it might become like a tool where every film maker might have in the future. Right now there are a lot of features that have to be added and a lot of work is in progress. The app will be more relevant when we go back to theatres. The content consumption has changed, the audience behaviour changed as we enter into a new normal phase. Apparently 70 percent of the rural population migrated to e-commerce business. The gap that would have taken five to ten years to fill up has now been filled in this Covid period. On the average everybody has a minimum of two or more OTT subscriptions and tomorrow the spending capacity will grow once we have the vaccine and there is a rebound in the economy.”
The long term gain is to have data for OTT is very valuable and Bingeit will be tagging people based on their experiences. There are tons of recommendations from the app, word of mouth for every content is spreading, data points that are good and bad are visible. The users will be rating the films. Tharun further says the internet has democratised. Reviewing will be even more valid when viewers get power to review content and this situation is going to give birth to a new movie network where movie buffs can sit down and discuss cinema like we all did in Irani Cafes.
Ask him about the response and how he wishes to benefit from it, he says, “So right now in two and half days, we collected 50 thousand viewers and its happening really quick, organically users flowing into the app is amazing. We are a core team, small size and I know it will expand to a bigger size. There is a business potential in terms of user data and ad revenue. We are trying to put user experience as top most priority. We shall make the ads non-invasive as much as possible. There could be spotlight on reviewers. Every time a critic writes his review, he will automatically get his users and followers. The critic will be given 500 words to discuss a film, we are putting it on trending and non trending based on user recommendations.”
He reiterates that a film like Pelli Chupulu or a startup like Bingeit faces the same situation. Everyone doubts the potential of a start up, encouragement is low as we are risk averse. There are many social media handles which were started by teenagers from foreign countries and received validation for their ideas and funding. Today we are talking about Atma Nirbhar Bharat. I know a lot of start ups don’t get funding, if money is the validation, so where is the risk taking nature? Every entrepreneur should have a venture capitalist who is willing to take the risk and help sell and scale it up globally.”
He signs off, “I have to work for better branding, tomorrow if I make a film with newcomers I don’t want to have problem scouting for distributors. We want to make sure film makers are brand by themselves. I wish the same for Venkatesh Maha, Vivek Athreya, Ravikanth Perepu and some more boys and I tell them social media presence is important. We are the face of our own films.”
