Exclusive interview with R. Sridharan, who cofounded the video news apps, which is now available in English, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu.
By Jayshal Sood
BANGALORE: The boom in smartphone sales and better and cheaper wireless broadband in India are giving rise to exciting new mobile start-ups. The newest to arrive on the scene is Nyusu, a “one-minute, multi-lingual video news with views” app, launched by two veteran journalists from the country: R. Sridharan, former Managing Editor of Times of India group’s business news channel, ET NOW, and H.R. Ranganath, a seasoned Kannada journalist-editor and now the man behind Karnataka’s highly popular news channel, Public TV. Nyusu’s Managing Editor is R Shankar, former editor of the Karnataka and Kerala Editions of The New Indian Express. Recently, The American Bazaar caught up with Sridharan to find out more about Nyusu and what it means for Indians inside and outside of the country. Excerpts from the interview:
Sri, what’s the idea behind Nyusu?
Nyusu is a child of all the changes that are happening around us in media. First of all, there’s a big shift happening from text to short videos, as is evident from even a cursory look at the biggest social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. There’s more and more of short videos that are now part of everyone’s newsfeed. The reason is simple: People would rather watch something more immersive than read. In fact, this insight came from watching my own 12-year-old son’s media habits.
Second, there’s been an explosion in smartphone population—India will sell more smartphones a year than the US by 2018—but there hasn’t been a matching boom in content that is custom-made for the smartphone. The news apps that exist in India at the moment give you video content that was made for television but is being badly squeezed into a small screen i.e. the mobile phone. Then, there are other news apps that aggregate text-based content. And if one were to look at regional languages like Nyusu does, then it is very clear there is almost no custom-content for the smartphone user.
Given the opportunity, we chose not to be a content aggregator but a content creator. We want to create a Nyusu brand of unbiased and independent reporting of news and views. We do this across six languages at the moment: English, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu. We intend to add other Indian languages over the next one year.
Is Nyusu of relevance to the Indian diaspora in North America and other parts of the world?
You will be surprised. Most of our initial downloads that happened word-of-mouth were in countries outside of India. Listen, I have a brother who has been living in Texas for the last 12 years and we Skype almost every weekend. But he often doesn’t know the big stories happening back home or even if he knows he doesn’t have the right fact-based information on it. That’s partly because news is becoming more and more editorialized. Therefore, even for Indians living abroad but who would like consume India-related news in either Hindi or English, we offer sharp and concise news and views on the most important stories in less than a minute. So, you could say Nyusu is inspired in part by my son and my brother (laughs).
For Indians living abroad but eager to know what’s happening in their own states back home, there is no better destination than Nyusu. Let me explain why. If you look at the ownership of media at states, especially south, it is pretty conflicted. The TV channels are owned directly by political parties or by some business house that is either aligned to a political party or uses media as a shield for its business. What happens as a result is, the news consumer doesn’t get an objective and independent point of view on important stories. We are changing that and people are responding with enthusiasm. For example, in Tamil, our Facebook page has a reach of 350,000 and in Telugu we are nearing 150,000. And, mind you, our marketing activity has not even started! No doubt, that’s why Ranga bought the idea of Nyusu in less than 10 minutes. And I am not exaggerating!
So, finally, how do you plan to monetize Nyusu? Are you charging a subscription fee of your users?
No, Nyusu is a free-to-download app on both the App Store and Google Play. Some of my friends had suggested charging the overseas consumer an annual fee. But I didn’t think that was fair. I believe we must not differentiate between our users. Therefore, we will be monetizing Nyusu through pre-roll ads like what YouTube does and some sponsored videos.