Mela announces First Day First Show

Mela announced a major initiative today - First Day First Show (FDFS). Mela will start releasing on a regular basis new Bollywood movies worldwide simultaneous to their theatrical releases in India.

Bollywood fans are already enjoying the Mela service in more than 55 countries, a list that is growing on a daily basis. Under FDFS, studios and producers will be able to reach a global audience simultaneously. Fans will have the convenience of enjoying new movies in great quality without leaving their house, no matter where they're located worldwide. We're starting with new movies which normally do not get an international theatrical release. Today, pirated solutions are the only options for consumers outside of India to watch these movies when they get released in India. Not any more. Mela is committed to fixing this global distribution problem. We're fortunate to be able to work with a slate of pretty progressive content owners who share our vision.

Mela was labeled as the "Netflix for Bollywood" when we launched. With our FDFS initiative, Mela is further pushing the envelope and moving way beyond Netflix, which has been unable to secure new Hollywood movies until several months after their theatrical releases.

Our press release is below:

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Mela Becomes the First-Ever Global Online Service to Release New Bollywood Movies Simultaneous to Their Theatrical Releases 

Chaurahen releases worldwide on Mela on March 16th simultaneous to its theatrical release in India

SANTA CLARA, Calif., March 16, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Mela, a global multi-platform consumer entertainment service with one of the largest aggregations of premium South Asian content, today announced the launch of First Day First Show, an initiative under which it will release new Bollywood movies in international markets simultaneous to their theatrical releases in India. Bollywood movie fans outside of India will now be able to enjoy new movies from the comfort of their living rooms no matter where they are located in the world.

Mela is the first-ever major Bollywood movie service in the world to launch such an initiative. Bollywood is the most prolific movie industry in the world, releasing more than three times as many movies per year as Hollywood, its more popular rival. Despite its global popularity, Hollywood has yet failed to simultaneously release new movies in every country in the world.

Mela is announcing the formal launch of its First Day First Show initiative with the simultaneous global release of the award-winning and multi-starring Bollywood film Chaurahen. The film will release globally on all Mela platforms - the Mela Bollywood movies channel on Roku, the Mela app on iPad and the Mela High Definition set top box on Friday, March 16. The film is being released the same day in theatres in India by its local distributor, Priya Village Roadshow (PVR).

Chaurahen (Crossroads), a film directed by Rajshree Ojha, who previously directed Aisha, in addition to two other popular specialty projects, boasts an impressive ensemble cast that includes Soha Ali Khan, Victor Banerjee, veteran Bollywood actress Zeenat Aman, and Kiera Chaplin, granddaughter of the silent film superstar Charlie Chaplin. The film is an adaptation of short stories by celebrated author Nirmal Verma. Ojha describes the three vignettes that comprise Chaurahen as "snippets of collected photographs, bringing together similar disconnected people trying to find their path." Originally completed in 2007, Chaurahen went on to screen at 11 international film festivals before securing theatrical distribution in India by PVR Cinema and global online distribution by Mela.

Chaurahen is not the first Bollywood movie to make its international distribution debut on Mela's global platform simultaneous to its theatrical release in India. Mela earlier released Puja Jatinder Bedi's Ghost and Sudish Kamath's Good Night Good Morning. The performance of these two smaller budget titles convinced Ojha of the effectiveness of Mela's global distribution platform.

"The quality of the Mela service, engagement of its audience, and the global reach of its platform will appeal to any content owner looking for a highly effective global distribution platform," expressed Ojha. After an arduous process to seek adequate distribution, she is optimistic that simultaneous worldwide release of the film through Mela will bring her already acclaimed film to an even broader global audience.

Sab Kanaujia, the General Manager of Mela, commented, "Mela is proud to become the first entertainment service to provide Bollywood producers and studios arguably the most effective global distribution platform. Now, quality content can reach its fans immediately, no matter where they are in the world. We are excited to acquire Chaurahen. While we are starting with mid- to small-budget movies under this initiative, we are confident that over time we will be able to acquire big-budget movies by demonstrating the value of our distribution platform."

Almost fifty percent of new Bollywood movies released in India every year do not get a simultaneous theatrical release in international markets due to various reasons. Limited number of available screens for releasing niche content and high traditional distribution and marketing cost are the main reasons why many Bollywood movies after releasing in India do not reach their global fans. As a result, rampant piracy has taken root in international markets to meet the growing demand of ardent fans who don't want to wait until official DVDs are released several weeks or months after a new movie's theatrical release in India. Additionally, cheap, pirated DVDs, available within days of a movie's theatrical release in India, have almost killed the home box office market because the price of official DVDs has remained very high comparatively.

Mela has been working with various producers and studios in India to ensure that a wide selection of films can leverage its global distribution platform and provide Mela subscribes a high-quality movie watching experience when the demand is the highest. Content owners will, for the first time, be able to distribute and monetize their content on a worldwide basis from day one. Fans will have a very compelling, legal alternative to enjoy new Bollywood movies in a high quality that was previously unavailable to them.

About Mela: Mela, a division of Verismo Networks Inc, is a multi-platform entertainment service that provides global consumers one of the largest collections of premium South Asian movies, music videos and TV content. Mela offers dozens of live television channels covering news and entertainment, hundreds of Bollywood, South Asian regional and independent movies, with an increasing number of titles in high definition, and selected premium videos from the Internet. Mela's content partners include India's leading and most popular film studios and television networks. Mela is available on multiple distribution platforms including Mela's high definition set-top box, the popular Roku streaming player, and Apple iPad. Mela's popular Bollywood movie service is available for $4.99 per month for instant, unlimited viewing of over 1,000 hit Bollywood and South Asian regional movies. Mela also offers a bundled package which includes its award winning, high-definition set-top-box with over seventy live television channels and 1,000+ popular movies available on-demand for a promotional price of $149 for one year of service.  Mela plans to later roll out its service on other major platforms including PC, tablets, Internet connected televisions, video gaming consoles, phones, Internet connected Blu-ray players, and other over-the-top devices. Mela is owned by Verismo Networks, a Silicon Valley based company that offers business customers worldwide solutions to bring  seamless convergence of IPTV linear channels, video-on-demand, Internet videos, social networking and personal media playback directly to consumer's television. Verismo is backed by Intel Capital. To learn more about Mela, please visit www.mela.com. To learn more about Verismo, please visit www.verismonetworks.com.

Social recommendation reaching long-promised potential

Content on the Internet has been exploding exponentially. YouTube, the largest video site on the Internet, adds ten hours of new video every single minute. By some measure, 10M new pages are added on the World Wide Web every day. The world of blogs has also grown tremendously, with Technorati, the popular blog search engine, tracking over 120M blogs worldwide (excluding millions that are not tracked in China, country with the world's largest Internet population).

This makes discovery of new content a huge challenge for both users (how to discover) and publishers (how to get discovered). I'm going to focus only on the user challenge in this post.

As the content on the Internet continues to multiply dramatically, the ability for users to find the content that may exist out there, which they may like and therefore want to consume, poses one of the most significant problems on the Web. Search engines have become a popular tool for users to find what they're looking for, but Search requires users to express their intent first. Since you don't know what you don't know, discovery of new content that you are unaware of, but may like, necessitated the development of recommendation engines, which proactively suggest what content users may like without much, if any, explicit action on their part.

Recommendation engines broadly fall under three categories:

1) Editorial recommendation: This is the most basic form of recommendation method whereby the editor/publisher picks what to highlight on its site amongst all available content - e.g., "featured video of the day", "featured story of the week," etc. This is a one-size-fits-all approach, where the recommendation focuses on publisher's goals and/or the average consumption behavior/demand amongst all visitors to the site, and is not customized for each individual visitor.

2) Customized recommendation based on individual's behavior: This method involves analyzing each user's content consumption pattern and using technology to recommend similar content to that user. This is the most difficult approach technically. Complex algorithms are needed to 1) "read" and categorize the repository of all available content on one hand, 2) track, capture and analyze each user's consumption patterns, and then 3) match those patterns against the categorized repository to make recommendations which are uniquely customized for each user.

Examples of this approach include the Pandora Internet radio that provides customized radio channels to users based on the songs users initially select to hear. Pandora's Music Genome Project utilizes 400 different characteristics to classify all available songs into categories that are leveraged by Pandora to understand a user's music taste and recommend him/her relevant songs. Cinematch, Netflix's movie rental recommendation system, is another such example.

"Reading" the content repository and categorizing them, say, in logical genres, is the most difficult aspect of this approach. Getting the recommendation correct with a high level of accuracy on a consistent basis is extremely hard. Since the recommendation engine works in the background, employing complex algorithms and other behavioral science factors, users expect the "black box" to make correct recommendation every single time. Getting it 90% correct, though impressive, may still not win user's loyalty and trust. If I hate chick flicks, make one such movie recommendation to me, and that's the last time I'd trust the technology behind the recommendation engine.

Netflix, recognizing the complexity of this recommendation approach, has an on-going contest, launched in October 2006, that will award $1M to the person that can improve the accuracy of its already-impressive Cinematch movie recommendations by 10%.

3) Social recommendation: This approach makes content recommendation to a user based on usage patterns of other users instead of his/her own consumption pattern. It's essentially a popularity contest, where popularity amongst a set of users is measured to make recommendations.

Social recommendation comes in two flavors. The set of users used to measure popularity can be either a limited set - user's friends (social graph), members belonging to a particular group or affiliation, etc - or the general set of all users consuming content on the site (e.g., most viewed, highest rated, etc).

Of the two, social recommendation based on preferences of my social graph - people I trust - holds the biggest promise amongst all approaches currently being utilized to make content recommendations. Reasons: 1) the approach requires rather simple technology, 2) users expectations are managed - not all recommendations need to be on the mark because everyone has friends whose tastes are different from their own - and 3) the approach simply works, because it follows a long and well established norm in the real world. By some measures, more than 30% of new content consumed by people is based on recommendation from someone they know and trust. Web 2.0 tools and changing user behavior where more and more people are sharing and contributing more and more stuff on the Internet is making social recommendation based on a user's social graph a mainstream reality.

The phenomenal growth of Twitter (32M users in May vs. 1.6M a year ago), and status update feature (copied from Twitter) used by Facebook's 200M+ users has immensely contributed in the social discovery of new content on the ever-growing World Wide Web. Given the relevancy due to the context provided by my social graph, I check out most of the links, photos, videos, and stories suggested to me on Facebook.

Publishers will very soon look at social recommendation engines as a major source of traffic to their sites, maybe more important than Web search engines, which on average contributes to as much as a third of all traffic to a publisher's site today. The impact on Google's business as a leading Web search engine remains to be seen. But users are not complaining. Why should they, if their trustworthy social graph is at work, 24/7/365, to open the doors to exciting, new content on the Web for them.