Indian start-up streams videos to your phone

BANGALORE, INDIA: You might have watched popular viral videos on websites such as YouTube and ended up getting disappointed, when those turned out to be the sort you never liked.

Imagine a solution that brings to you online video based on your personal preferences, apart from the trending ones. Here is one such in Shufflr, by Althea Systems.

An 'early stage technology start-up', Althea intends to simplify video discovery on the Internet, by employing social media, blended with an equivalent mix "of good old common sense."

Its co-founder and chief executive officer, Kishore A.K., along with his close-knit team of 19 others, has pulled off what he terms as a product that would rival the likes of YouTube and Hulu — an on-demand online video streaming service.

"Shufflr is a platform, not just an app, that we are building. Our first product was offered as a desktop app, the next was a Web app and then, there is a phone app now," he says.

In 2009, Kishore and three others wanted to drive product development based out of India, which was yet to break the shackles of the 'service-oriented' mindset, and thus born their company.

Then, they zeroed in on the then lingering issue of video discovery, what with a huge supply side explosion in the online video space. A products company needs to be built ground-up, observes Kishore.

"For enabling search, there is the human curation approach and the metadata-based algorithmic one, which people tended to tamper with. So, we opted for a mix of both utilizing social media trends. In Shufflr, you don't search for videos, but videos find you," he elaborates.

Shufflr enables one to discover, watch and share videos on the Net. It also makes suggestions based on every user's past viewing records and behavior on social media. It has 14 online video categories.

Its social video feed helps users find out what their friends have been watching and the buzz feed keeps them clued in to social media trending topics. While you can search, tag and share videos, you might as well follow others with similar tastes and get to know what they had been viewing.

"For instance, if you are a Facebook user, you can integrate the Shufflr app on it and watch videos," explains Kishore, adding, "Users of iPhone, notebooks and tablets also can download the app and have it installed on their instruments."

The number of registered users of Shufflr crossed one million last week. Surprisingly, India is not even among the top-10 consumer nations of this product conceptualized and designed in Bangalore.

"We have users from 160 countries, including U.S., Austraia, Singapore, Taiwan and Malaysia. In fact, a lot of Chinese use our app using proxy servers. In India, once broadband issues are resolved, 3G takes off and unlimited data plans are made available, the market for online video discovery would open up,"  reckons Kishore.

Since the solution provider decides on what people would watch, it makes a great proposition for start-ups to look at this lucrative segment. "It puts you in a very powerful position. Moreover, you can monetize easily by monitoring consumer behavior."

According to him, a major reason for not many players getting into products is because of lack of success stories in the past. "Now, we are seeing the change."

Soon, Althea has plans to diversify into other product categories and double its current headcount as well. "As of now, we are focused on building a tablet app. In future, we might recruit in the U.S., too, since we are planning to open a business unit there," says Kishore.

In the years to come, he wants the company and its products to have global appeal in the consumer technology products segment.