Addressing need gaps in offline entertainment: Gaurav Kapahi

Authored by Gaurav Kapahi, Co-Founder, Goldseat

Gaurav heads sales and strategy at GoldSeat, along with the overall operations. He started GoldSeat with the idea of providing entertainment services to the travellers in all forms of transports. Gaurav is an MBA in Marketing from MDI, Gurgaon with over 10 years of work experience. Previously he was the Marketing Head for Media and Life Sciences) at HCL Technologies.

The travel sector in India is estimated to be at 660 million passengers, primarily dominated by road travel (500Mn) followed by railway (90Mn) and air (70Mn). According to the Indian Brand Equity Foundation, during January-April 2018 Foreign Exchange Earnings from tourism increased 17.4 per cent year-on-year to $10.62 billion. Also, according to Media Partners Asia, a research and consulting firm, YouTube and Facebook combined accounted for 75 per cent of online video advertising in the Asia-Pacific at the end of 2017.

With net connectivity of just 40% and only 10% of it supporting 4G speed while travelling on-road (ON HIGHWAYS), it is a great opportunity for entrepreneurs to come up with an initiative that could bring in offline entertainment with WiFi support on-the-go. Offline entertainment allows access to HD content even in low OR NO connectivity zones. Currently, most of the players in the offline entertainment space are providing non-licensed content for its viewers. Referring to the scenario, it is high time quality entertainment content is offered to travellers on their phone that runs seamlessly on their devices without them having to worry about data costs. It is equally important to provide licensed content to counter piracy in the market and thus, making a structural progress in the travel entertainment zone.

With GoldSeat, we provide licensed offline content that runs seamlessly on travellers’ devices without them having to worry about data costs and connectivity. The WiFi is a multi-band network and is enabled with web based cloud filtering which controls the kind of content which can be accessed. While the application is completely free for the passengers, bus owners and operators have to take a monthly subscription to access to high-speed Internet, live camera service for security, etc. along with other services. GoldSeat is confident of achieving a long-term goal of becoming a pan-India entertainment partner for passengers across metros, trains, aircraft, and buses.

Most of the time, personal gadgets have limited downloaded content considering internal memory, making one’s overall journey quite boring. This is where the inevitability to have access to entertaining content comes, especially if you are one of those people who can’t sleep while travelling— whether on a bus or on an aircraft. With mobiles becoming the primary source of entertainment on the go, investing in the segment of content consumption during travel has become all the more fruitful.

The Indian digital media segment is already on the course of disruption with growth expected to reach INR 200 billion (INR 20000 crores) by 2020 with digital ad spend expected to grow at 23-28%. Thriving content generation and consumption have made digital as the most prominent form of media. Also, the preference of the Indian consumers towards vernacular and regional language content is constantly on the upswing with 93% of the time spent on videos in Hindi and other regional languages. Digital content producers can thus look at aggregating/ producing vernacular content to capture these set of audiences.

With technology prospering every day, entrepreneurs believe that they can hit upon the formula to make travel entertainment streaming a success. With phones getting larger, and people getting used to consuming videos thanks to the Reliance Jio effect, the timing for a service like offline licensed content consumption is just right. Since content consumption has increased, so has the awareness around providing legal HD quality content for the owners of these bus fleets, hence giving a greater chance of impacting the overall surface of travel universe.