Travel Sector: Entrepreneurs See Opportunity in the Space

The travel sector in India is estimated to be at 660 million, 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.

The Scenario On The Go

With net connectivity of just 40per cent and only 10per cent 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 accessing 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 structural progress in the travel entertainment zone.

There are players who offer content that runs seamlessly on travellers' devices without them having to worry about data costs and even without connectivity. They focus on transforming the travel journey for Indian travellers by offering multiple entertainment facilities including a huge variety of movies available to watch offline, WiFi among others.

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 through the WiFi. The application is completely free for the passengers.

Primary Source of Entertainment, Mobile

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.

Digital Boom

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 23-28per cent. 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 93per cent 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.