Indiantelevision.com's Digital Edge: Rediff launches iShare, ties up with Zee's 'Sa Re Ga Ma Pa'

Indiantelevision.com's Digital Edge

Rediff launches iShare, ties up with Zee's 'Sa Re Ga Ma Pa'

Indiantelevision.com Team

(10 July 2007 10:33 pm)

NEW DELHI: Move over YouTube and Orkut. The indigenous iShare is here with claims of doing more than either of them.

And to mark its launch, the IT platform announced a deal wherein those who failed to make it to the Hero Honda Sa Re Ga Ma Pa musical talent show on Zee TV can post their videos or audios on iShare and stand the chance of getting chosen to perform in the finals.

Zee TV marketing head Tarun Mehra said one of the five short-listed entries will be selected to become the ‘Voice of Rediff’ and get to perform in the finals.

He said that the show was the world’s first Indian music contest (‘Sangeet ka pratham vishwa-yudh’) and a platform like iShare would help aspirants from all continents to take part and be part of the contest.

Earlier, Rediff.com CEO Ajit Balakrishnan told a press meet here that the principal aim of iShare was to link the 53 million Indians worldwide outside India with those within the country.

Rediff.com vice president marketing Manish Agarwal said the multimedia social content sharing platform will allow users to share videos, music, pictures on a single platform.

He said the platform would be ‘a catalyst for Indians to share and connect’, sharing the joy of a digital lifestyle. He claimed that what might have proved to be a technological complexity had been turned into product simplicity by the software developers at Rediff.Com.

Perhaps in the light of the problems that both YouTube and Orkut have run into, iShare has provision for reporting abuse, and a person who is logged on can object to any content by simply clicking on a key for reporting abuse.

With multimedia entertainment on the Internet expected to be one of the fastest growing segments online, the launch of iShare is part of a strategy by Rediff.Com to give a complete online offering for videos, audio files and pictures, and unlimited storage facility.

The iShare platform comes with an easy to use utility tool, which users can install on their personal computers and upload multiple files even at low-speed without having to worry about the source of the file. Users will be able to upload pictures and videos made in mobile phones, digicam, digital camcorder and music from mp3 players like ipods.

Agarwal said that another advantage was that iShare supported recordings in any format – mpeg, wmi and so on - and could convert them into ‘flash’ format.

He admitted that the aim would also be to build the platform into a business opportunity and there will be commercial advertisements as well.