Rediff’s iShare…mainstream Indian portals wake up to user aggregated media
Rediff has just launched a media sharing portal called iShare. This allows you to share different genres of media- videos, photos & music, all at one place. Something like this from India’s biggest portal was long overdue. I think till now mainstream Indian portals i.e. Rediff, Sify, Indiatimes etc have largely touched user generated media with a barge pole rather than going full blast. That might begin to change with iShare (I think others are likely to follow suit).
That Rediff is giving iShare a serious shot can be gauged from the fact that it has released a desktop uploading tool for ishare (screenshot below). This is a 1.6 MB download that sits on your desktop and media files can be dragged ‘n dropped into the tool for uploading to iShare via your Rediffmail account. I spent two minutes downloading and installing it and it seemed to work flawlessly. The site has different sections for video, photos & music and the content can be spliced along popularity, recency & user ratings. The music & video sections incidentally have clips/songs from popular Hindi movies (many of which are likely to be copyright insensitive); it will be interesting to see how the copyright violations issue plays out on iShare.
So how is iShare significant and can it stand up and be counted in a situation where the only video and photo sharing sites that have traction in India are the global defaults i.e. Flickr & Youtube. The answer to that question depends on who you are asking; I for one believe that there is a strong case for Indian versions of Flickr & Youtube to gain ascendency inspite of the popularity of the global sites. What is needed is the convergence of a few causal factors like -
- content integrity in terms of its relevance to India
- availability of an anchor destination that draws millions to the base site
- long term strategy overriding short terms tactical considerations
Rediff could well be a perfect candidate for the nucleation of these factors. Watch this space !
Silly thought- Is Rediff tryng to be the Apple of India? First iLand (their blogging platform) & now iShare? What do you think?
Screenshot of the desktop uploading tool
Moksh Juneja on Jul 10, 2007
Will surely be checking it out .. after downloading the software faced a problem with the application - that it was not working
preetam rai on Jul 10, 2007
This is a good start. I only wonder why this did not happen earlier. it is so much better to upload to server within india then one outside. Having said that I guess it is now easier for the authorities/specific interest groups to get rediff to take down the videos they don’t like…
Cyrus N on Jul 12, 2007
Yes Amit , Rediff could well be a perfect candidate for the nucleation of these factors and they have shown the courage to bell the cat . This product can become a landmark in Indian Internet Industry simply because there are a lot of grey areas in the laws in India about content sharing over internet.This is the first time a listed company is doing something , wonder how they are going to implement teh revenue sharing mechaism . Media companies will be better off if they tie up with Rediff and similar companies and treat this as a channel to distribute content. It may have more impact than You tube because for Indian Users still Rediff is No 1 for content
WebSatan on Jul 12, 2007
Well it is definitely a high time that Indian portals start working on BDAs .
I really dont know how big a success ishare would be but its definitely going to be a motivation for many other startups.
Trakin on Jul 12, 2007
The one thing that makes ishare a bit different than other startups of similar nature is that it is a rediff venture and obviously one gets a headstart rightaway. However, in long term Rediff has to ensure that they keep the stickiness by introducing new features.
rajadurai on Aug 6, 2007
that software when downloaded displayed “ishare.exe - application error” … help me out pls