Media Monday: A new local listing site, some ‘Action’ and DTH players under scanner

Infomedia 18 launches local listing website askme.in- why not use ‘burrp’ brand?

Infomedia 18 recently launched it long awaited local lsiting website askme.in which boasts of having 3 million businesses on its platform and is going to offer a unique feature ‘Click to Call’.

‘Click to call’ will allow any user to connect to the business for free (wow that’s awesome). So consumers would no longer require, spending extra money on the useless calls made to local businesses.

There are not many other special features in there, but have a close look and one can understand that their UI is a combination of the popular listing websites- sulekha and justdial.

But my interest was more in finding out why they bought “burrp” for 4.25 Crores last year? I could see them listing ‘burrp-city guide’ and ‘burrp tv guide’ alongside their other online ventures but then at the bottom I saw this label ‘Powered by burrp!’. It seems that they bought burrp to use some of their existing algorithms which burrp was using for its local search engine and listings. But then why they didn’t use the brand power of burrp? I mean wouldn’t it be making sense to launch a new and advanced burrp, rather than parting off another new venture out of it?

One reason I guess here could be the brand association- burrp is usually associated with ‘youth’, the review guides for bar and restaurants and askme.in is a listing website. Though they could use some backend algos of burrp in askme.in, making burrp a local listing site could have tempered its brand.

But am I guessing right or there could be some other reasons as well. What do you think?

‘UTV Action’ knocks out its competitors

Within 2 weeks of its launch, ‘UTV Action’ a new offering from UTV is showing some real action and is giving tough competition to existing players like ‘Filmy’ and ‘B4U Movies’. The Channel garnered 32 GRPs in its second week as against 11 GRPs in its first week. The other competitors ‘Filmy’ grew with 24 points while ‘B4U Movies’ managed a GRP of 2.

The main strategy working out for UTV Action is their combination of Hindi and English (dubbed in Hindi) action movies. And as per their plans they are going to show 2-3 Hindi movies every week.

So if you’re not in Action surf UTV Action :).

Do you want to change your DTH operator while keeping the same Set Top Box?

It may look quite very obvious now with my question, but the very fact is that currently no DTH operator allows you to switch to other operator keeping the same Set Top box. Since you’re paying for a set top box which is just another hardware, and can be made inter-operable it sounds logical enough for a regulation to be made.

As per the Competition Commission of India (CCI) the cost of retaining the hardware i.e. 4000 is big enough an amount to discourage operator switching for consumers.

It’s a real good move as Set Top box industry still remains very proprietary kind of thing and discourages open source development of software and protocols. Let’s hope such moves can open up the industry a bit for other DTH related industries to grow.

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Author: rabigupta

Rabi Gupta is a start up enthusiast and Founder of iDubba.com (Intelligent Box). He is passionate about new and interesting ideas in media and entertainment field.  Read more of his stuff at blog.idubba.com or follow him on twitter as @idubba.

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Tagged as: algos, askme, askme.in, b4u movies, Burrp, CCI, DTH, extra money, grps, Justdial, launch, local listing, local search, Sulekha, tv guide, UTV Action