A. TRAI’s move although in the right direction for the benefit of end consumers haven’t really taken into accounts the needs & requirements of the VAS players. The whole issues of privacy, opt-in & industry growth have to be looked into holistically to be able to come up with recommendations & guidelines.

Also the regulatory body should create an environment of enablement & parity for VAS players to be able to create pull for services with the support of operators. In a nutshell the guidelines should be made & implemented in a phased manner keeping in mind the viewpoint of all concerned & business viability.  

Q. Indian VAS market which is currently pegged at around INR 16,000 crore (US $2,937 million) does not have a standalone association or industry body to present a unified voice to the government, service providers and other stakeholders. Your comments. 

A. A centralized VAS industry body/association is one of the immediate requirements which can help keep the interests of VAS vendors, application developers in mind while coming out with policy implementations. Currently, in the absence of such a body, the revenue models are significantly skewed, resulting in fairly low revenue shares for VAS vendors & application developers. Also, such an industry body will also help take VAS providers’ views on various policy implementations and finally come out with policies beneficial to every entity in the VAS ecosystem. This will have an overall positive impact on innovations and investments in this space going forward.

Q. Currently, most of the applications are not able to provide optimum user experience because of the and width issues. How do look at this? 

A. One of the biggest roadblocks for any video based VAS is bandwidth and in India there is a scarcity of spectrum. Moreover, while 4G is already here, 3G airwaves have yet not been rolled out completely. So the current scenario leaves the data VAS players to go some extra mile in order to better the product so that the end user has the same experience that we want to provide them.

We have invested about $11 million to make our technical backend robust and we will continue to better the technical backend services. In order to overcome the problem of fluctuating bandwidth nexGTv has developed a technology called Adaptive Streaming. This unique feature is developed to enable seamless viewing of content even in a 2G network for an uninterrupted TV experience.  

Other than this we also have 24x7 customer care center that is extremely proactive in assisting our five million users and other potential subscribers with any problem that they are facing.

Q. What are you future plans?

A. After receiving an overwhelming response of five million users of nexGTv just within one year of its inception, we are motivated to unveil applications related to health, utility, gaming and virtual mall in the near future. We invest heavily in our technical back-end support that makes our application work seamlessly and we endeavor to deliver similar experience to our users with our upcoming applications.