 "Music Katha Ha"  "Music Pitae ha "  Lover Boy Amit |
Reality TV shows text SMS revenue earnings for
telcos
13 Sep, 2007, 0507 hrs IST,Kalyan Parbat & Ashoke Nag, TNN
KOLKATA: With an average 1.5 billion SMSes generated nationally every week,
the Indian SMS saga is already the stuff of legend. If anything, the marriage
of reality TV shows and mobile telephony now promises to set the national SMS
turf on fire. Check this out — an 11-hour voting window (between 9 pm and 8
am) during last Friday’s Gala Round in Sony Entertainment TV India’s popular
Indian Idol 3 music contest raked in well over three million SMSes from across
India and key overseas locations like London, Dubai and Singapore. This was
confirmed by a senior SET India official.
But here’s the juicy bit. The unofficial number doing the rounds is that at
least five million votes hit Sony’s SMS gateway. Neither SET India nor the
mobile guys are willing to confirm this. But at a flat Rs 3 per message, the
SMS revenue alone during that 11-hour voting slot would work out to a cool Rs
1.5 crore. Add to that revenues from a few million voice message votes at Rs 6
each which also hit home. SET India circles confirmed that “bulk of the SMS
traffic stemmed from Hutch and Airtel networks”.
Top honchos at SET India are truly gung-ho. “The total SMS-driven voting
levels during the September 7 Gala episode itself was far in excess of three
million. And these SMS votes came in just 11-hour voting window. Now that
we’re down to the wire and people have to make a choice between the two
finalists, Amit Paul and Prashant Tamang, I anticipate SMS-based voting to be
8-to-10 times the three million-plus SMS levels scaled last Friday. This is
since the voting will be spread over two weeks till the Grand Finale on
September 23,” said Mr Albert Almeida, who is executive vice-president and
business head at SET India.
ET also spoke to a cross-section of the mobile flock, including Hutch, Airtel
and BSNL, to get a fix on the real SMS impact of Indian Idol 3. While there’s
a tight lid on all Indian Idol-related SMS numbers, leading mobile operators
confirmed that SMS volumes were huge. It’s a different matter that SMS data
trickling in from mobile operators tended to be more conservative than SET
India’s projections.
Even as Indian Idol 3 hits the final stage, mobility circles expect voting
lines to nationally generate five million SMSes in the final stretch from
September 14-to-23 which will see several face-offs between the two finalists
— Shillong’s Amit Paul and city cop, Prashant Tamang. For instance, a director
at one of the country’s biggest cellular service providers said: “The
two-and-a-half month long Indian Idol 3 context is likely to generate a shade
over 15 million SMSes nationally, which is huge for a single TV show, but
merely a drop in India’s SMS ocean, given that the national mobile market
generates over 1.5 billion SMSes every week. In ARPU (average revenue per
user) terms the increase will be a tiny 10 paise in gross revenue terms for
mobile operators.”
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