First Feature Film to be Delivered via Mobile Phone…was a while ago

Rok on mobileHungama Mobile — part of Hungama, the largest aggregator, developer and publisher of Bollywood content in the world — premiered the first entire feature film, Rok Sako To Rok Lo, on mobile…in 2004. It was streamed live to Airtel EDGE users at a scheduled time on 9th December, one day before theatrical release. Neeraj Roy, the Managing Director and CEO of Hungama Mobile, presented at the XMediaLab in Melbourne, Australia, last month. He gave a lucid speech about mobile content, content rights (they arrange for all the actors to receive royalties for the content distributed through mobiles) and about the film. He was refreshingly candid about the success of the mobile launch saying that of the 1,800 who watched the film only 22 stayed on to watch it in entirety and of that 22, 18 worked for Hungama! They’re still trying to find out, he said, who the other 4 were! Those understandably sceptical of long-form viewing on mobiles will be interested to hear Roy prophesized that the technical convergence of 3G, Bluetooth and projector phones will facilitate a revolution in feature-film viewing where people can project their favourite film, for instance, onto a rock in the outback…technology that will be available “soon”.

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