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ZEE TV LOOKS AT
Q2 2000 ISP AND PORTAL LAUNCH
Zee Telefilms has announced that its
subsidiary E-Connect India Ltd will launch ZeeNEXT,
its Internet access and portal service by March 2000
in Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi. The company which
secured an ISP licence early this year has lined up
an investment plan of Rs 4,000 million in to set up
its infrastructure over the next three years. The
company intends to even set up international gateways
for which it will be using its own satellite Agrani
at some stage. A lot of its backend is going to be
outsourced to other vendors and suppliers, the company
says. Zee Telefilms says it is basing its business
models on the AOL and @Home service in the US.
While it finally intends to deliver
Internet access via its 4 million subscriber strong
cable TV network, Siticable, it will initially start
with telephone access. The company's target is to
attract an overall subscriber base of 5% in the first
year, taking it up to 13% in year two to 18% in year
three to 25% in year five, which will in its estimates
give it four million users via telephone access and
a million via cable access.
The ZeeNext Portal site will have the
usual mix that portals provide: information, games,
news, classified, auctions, webcasting, radio, shopping,
chat, BBS, and messaging. But a key feature of ZeeNEXT
company officials say that users will be able to log
on to their email without having to access the Internet.
They add that the ZeeNEXT portal will function as
an agglomerator of content and will hence be more
than open to strategic partnerships with other portals
or information or service sites both Indian and international.
ZeeNEXT's managers were not clear on
what the subscription fees and usage costs are to
be, but indicators are that it could be in the region
of Rs 2,000 per month with no cap on usage time. This
is the pricing that it has been maintaining for its
200-home cable-delivered Internet service trial project
in the southern Indian city of Bangalore. The company
hopes to break even in the third year of operations
with a profit of Rs 36 million.
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