Konkan.Tv – Is it going to be the YouTube of India?

Jan 18, 2007

Konkan.Tv is the new venture of one of the famous Indian blogger, Rohan Pinto. Konkan is the name of the area in India and which is of around 30,000 sq. Kilometers in area and the reason Rohan kept this name was that he wanted to share the cultures, regions, traditions, lifestyle of people who have lived or share some roots in that area. Konkan.Tv is a video sharing website and which allows users to upload their videos for free. The fascinating thing about this service is that it is run and operated completely by one single person and that is Rohan himself. Isn’t that amazing and top of it the response time of the question asked to him related to the service is great. One will never complain about the customer service.

Now lets look at the positive and negative sides of the service and lets find out if it has the capability of becoming the YouTube of India. I know that it may be difficult but we never know that when a service gets popular in some part of the world. We can always take example of Myspace in U.S.A. or Orkut in Brazil or if third example then Bebo in U.K. I know that all these are social networks but Video sharing is also part of social networking only.

PROS of Konkan.Tv :

1. File Size : Konkan.Tv currently allows 100 MB per video file (normally video of around 10 min.).

2. Supported formats : It has huge range of supported formats (MPEG 1/2 ES/PS/PES/VOB, RIFF AVI, ASF, WMV, WMA, QT, MOV, MP4, RealVideo, OGG, OGM, NSV, NUT, VIVO, FLI, CPK, PVA, RoQ, YUV4MPEG, MATROSKA and NUPPELVIDEO ) and I think that it is the biggest list of video files supported by any service.

3. Small but good community : The good thing is that Konkan.Tv is working very nicely on the community building aspect. It currently has very small number of users but it is showing good signs of becoming a stronger community. I’m sure that in future this community will help Konkan.Tv to achieve much more.

4. Safe for Children : The community takes care of the uploaded content and moderates offensive material. It targets more on cultural videos and thus it can be educational as well. And because the community is small then you can list Konkan.Tv in the list of safe websites for your children.

5. Future plans : Rohan is planning quite a few handful features and the features will certainly help in increasing the popularity of Konkan.Tv and the plans look good as well. Right now he has the file limitation but the limitation may be removed in future and thus people will be able to upload files which will be larger than 100 MB. At this point of time only registered users can upload the videos but may be soon people will be able to upload files of around 10 MB and that too without signing up for the service.
Other plans include the single sign-on feature and thus anyone with any Microsoft cardspace, openid, liberty and yadis ID will be able to login to Konkan.Tv

6. Instant release : Uploaded videos are released instantly or mostly in a gap 10-15 minutes and thus a user doesn’t have to wait too much as opposed to 24-48 hrs. in Google videos.

CONS of Konkan.TV :

1. Not the best of the player controls : Konkan.Tv uses flash technology to display the videos just like other video sharing websites are doing but the player isn’t the best of the lot as it has a very small bar for the player and it would have been nice if the player controls or the buttons would have been bigger in size. That really doesn’t make a difference but ease of use is one thing which everyone looks for.

2. No offline video player or up-loader : Although Rohan is planning to release an AJAX based up-loader but it will be really nice if he could also release an offline video player for download-able files and a resume supported up-loader. That can be a real peace of mind for dial-up users or may be slow broadband connection users.

Overall Rating & Views about Konkan.Tv :

Konkan.Tv is a feature rich service and has a small Indian community attached to it. No doubt that it can become the YouTube of India, if at all popular bloggers in India start using this service. If at all, it gets picked up by the best bloggers in India then certainly, it will receive the boost which it deserves.

Links : Konkan.Tv

Technorati : Google, India, Konkan.tv, Reviewsaurus, YouTube