Apalya Tech to make overseas foray in FY11

Apalya Technologies Private Limited, a Hyderabad-based mobile video platform developer, is planning to enter overseas markets with its flagship mobile live streaming and video on-demand product ‘MimobiTV’ by the second quarter of the next financial year.

“For the last three years, we have been focusing only on the domestic market. From being a pioneer then to becoming a leader in this space now, time has come for us to start looking at other geographies. We are getting interests from telecom operators in West Asia and Southeast Asia and we will enter these geographies in tie up with local partners next year,” B Vamshi Krishna Reddy, director of Apalya, told Business Standard.

The four-and-a-half-year-old company had first implemented its MimobiTV for Idea Cellular in 2007. It currently offers its services to all the mobile operators in India, both GSM and CDMA players, offering a bouquet of 70 television channels covering genres including entertainment, news, sports, music and films. The closely-held company plans to add 20 more channels in the next six months.

Apalya had raised a $3-million (Rs 14.5 crore) venture capital fund from IDG Ventures India and Qualcomm Ventures in October this year, which it plans to infuse into creating additional infrastructure and content relationships, besides developing new service offerings for the new 3G regime. While 2.5G networks need 32-kilobit streaming, 3G requires close to 300 kilobit.

“With the 3G auctions coming up and services expected to be deployed by the telecom operators by the third quarter of the next financial year, we want to scale up our operations for the next phase of growth. If you look at the mobile TV as such, what we use now is the unicast technology (a communication between a single sender and a single receiver). We are trying to implement broadcast within the unicast, and this architecture will be developed completely in-house,” Reddy said.

The video streaming market is currently pegged at about $2 billion globally and is projected to touch $16 billion in the next two years. Though at a nascent stage now, the Indian market is expected to grow to $200 million once 3G is fully rolled out, he added.

“With the Indian market opening up to 3G, we also plan to further enhance our mobile entertainment services offerings like personalisation of the content and building interactivity features in the next version of MimobiTV,” Reddy said, adding the company expected 150 per cent growth in revenues this financial year over last fiscal.