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Tag: Vinay Pillai

  • Pocket Aces elevates Vinay Pillai to head of strategy

    Pocket Aces elevates Vinay Pillai to head of strategy

    MUMBAI: Homegrown digital entertainment company, Pocket Aces, has elevated Vinay Pillai to the dual position of head of strategy and head of clout. Vinay joined Pocket Aces in 2020 to scale Clout, its influencer management business, and has played a crucial role in getting it to a leadership position.

    In this enhanced role, Vinay will work on establishing key strategic partnerships that will not only aid in scaling the current revenue and profitability but also cement Pocket Aces’ leadership position in the sector long-term. Prior to Pocket Aces, Vinay was the co-founder of dekkho, India’s first content streaming OTT platform. Post dekkho, he headed the OTT platform at The Viral Fever, called TVF Play.

    Vinay is a computer science engineer and an MS from Columbia University, New York. He spent most of his career in product and strategy consulting with companies like DramaFever, DocPlace, and Booz in the US before returning to India.

    Commenting on his new position, Vinay Pillai shared, “I am extremely excited to take up this crucial additional responsibility to shape our strategic direction along with Aditi. Leading Clout over the last few years has been an absolute pleasure, and I have thoroughly enjoyed building it from scratch to a market leader today with an amazing team. Additionally, I look forward to now working with Pocket Aces’ finest leaders across other business units to help them scale our company to even greater heights. We have prided ourselves on always doing things in a data-backed way with a huge impetus on innovation. I feel honoured to now get to contribute in a Pocket Aces wide central capacity with our stellar young team and would like to thank Aditi for the opportunity.”

    Pocket Aces co-founder & CEO Aditi Shrivastava said, “For the head of strategy role, I wanted someone who would work alongside me to add to our vision of taking our cutting-edge media business to the next level. Vinay is a non-linear thinker. He has founder blood, as well as a blend of consulting and operational experience. These give him a unique vantage point on how to take on incumbents while also giving him the hard operational expertise of scaling businesses on the ground with growing teams. Vinay has done an excellent job of scaling Clout, and I’m excited to see him in this enhanced role. Vinay will be working closely with the rest of our management team, who will take the lead in putting our strategic direction into action.”

  • Dekkho to identify non-production house talent, plans four web series in Sept-Oct

    MUMBAI: Dekkho will largely focus on youth-based videos and regional content across six languages, primarily serving the 18-30 year old mobile audience.

    The online video streaming platform has announced plans to establish itself as the destination for talent discovery in India and showcase premium content from non-production house talent. Having collaborated with 80+ creators to curate premium videos across genres such as food, fashion, travel, lifestyle, comedy and gossip, the platform is now gearing up to run multiple digital promotions and events to identify emerging talent and get them on board over the next three to four quarters.

    The platform will also mark its foray into original content co-creation with four branded video properties, lined up for September-October period, in the form of web series, music videos, and short-form videos.

    Dekkho’s latest move is aimed at tapping into the unscripted and independent creator market, which comprises around 80 per cent of the overall production volume of online entertainment.

    As part of its marketing strategy, Dekkho has tied up with leading telecom operators and original phone equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to offer greater exposure to content developed by independent creators. The platform has additionally collaborated with partners like Amazon Fire TV.

    Co-founder Tanay Desai said, “Viewers today want more of short, snackable content that independent creators like AIB or Miss Malini produce. Our aim now is to create visibility through a bunch of exciting developments like localising our UI, promoting offline viewing and building for low data consumption. We are focused on Tier II, Tier III consumers who constitute the masses, and provide them a focused, curated experience that is missing on YouTube and Facebook.”

    “Dekkho,” he said, “will primarily host creators who are not associated with a label or production house. This initiative is synergistic with that vision, and will help us in discovering exciting talent from across the country to provide our viewers with premium content across age groups, geographies, and languages.”

    Says he: “Not only are we providing them with global exposure and monetisation opportunities through our advertising network and brand integrations, but this is the first time their ongoing content will be represented on a big screen format via our partnerships.”

    Dekkho aims at realising its target of reaching five million monthly active users within the next year and have 200 channels on board.

  • Dekkho makes big-screen debut with Amazon fire TV stick

    MUMBAI: The online video streaming Dekkho has partnered with Amazon to make its big-screen debut and provide its content on Amazon Fire TV Stick.

    Dekkho will be one of the featured apps on the streaming device, allowing users to access its entire content library of movies and videos across genres such as music, food, fashion, travel, lifestyle and comedy on a preferred basis. In addition, Fire TV Stick users can access content from Dekkho offline as well.

    The Amazon Fire TV Stick is a plug-and-play device that connects to the television’s HDMI port and allows users to access digital video content from a host of providers. The device can be set up in just three, simple steps — plug the device in to the HDMI port on the TV; attach the USB cord to the power source; and connect to the wi-fi.

    Dekkho will provide a range of specially curated content for Fire TV, offering a television-like experience through a smart, digital medium. Unlike other paid apps, Dekkho’s Content on Fire TV will be available on a free-to-use basis, thus enabling greater exposure for content creators through a new channel while monetising their properties. Dekkho’s attempt to bring independent online content creators on the big screen and provide them exposure through Amazon’s strong distribution model is the first by any Indian player.

    Dekkho co-founder Tanay Desai said, “Dekkho currently enjoys a unique position in the Indian OTT entertainment market. In a bid to expand our content outreach to smart TVs and similar large-screen offerings, this strategic partnership with Amazon Fire TV Stick will help us increase exposure for content creators on our platform. Moreover, it offers Dekkho an extremely promising entry into a larger online entertainment market and the chance to reach out to maximum viewers between 18 to 30 years of age. The resulting increase in reach can also be leveraged to extend our presence on more big-screen apps in the future and allow our users to stream our massive content catalogue on any digital device of their choice, conveniently and seamlessly.”

  • Dekkho: Integration ease aids Brightcove power OTT service

    MUMBAI: Brightcove, a leading provider of cloud services for video, announced today that Dekkho, a streaming video service specializing in delivering premium content from India’s top content creators, has selected Brightcove to power its OTT service. The service, which debuted in February 2017, was built on Brightcove Video Cloud, enabling Dekkho to leverage an industry-leading online video platform to offer consumers VOD access to 12,000 hours of programming across desktop and mobile applications.

    Dekkho provides its customers with a curated, high-quality video experience with video content ranging from three to 45 minutes. It partners with leading content producers such as Sony Music, Zee Music, Culture Machine, Times Group, and OML.

    “Brightcove constantly remains ahead of the curve, rapidly innovating to incorporate and leverage the constant changes in the online video industry,” said Dekkho co-founder Vinay Pillai.

    “Scalability was most critical for us. We need to deliver our content across a broad range of customers, from those with low-end phones and slow internet connections to people with high-end mobile devices and larger screens. Not only has Brightcove enabled us to do that technically, but their service has been outstanding. We were promised Tier-1 support and Brightcove has delivered.”

    Improving the viewing experience is one of the top challenges facing media organizations in 2017, and Dekkho required a platform with robust APIs that was easy for their application development team to leverage; in particular, the publisher was eager to integrate the video platform with its CMS for simpler ingestion of its videos. The scalability of the Brightcove platform, along with integrations with the majority of the content management systems (CMS), ad networks, and CDNs differentiated Brightcove from other providers.

    “Dekkho is yet another great example of the rise of OTT in India. They’ve managed to quickly launch an intuitive and unique experience, and we’re looking forward to being part of their success,” said Brightcove Asia VP Tomer Azenkot. “Brightcove is excited to be working with this innovative service and helping the company as online video consumption in India evolves.”