Listening to music and watching films has always fascinated Indians, especially while travelling. Santosh Kumar and Sai Krishna joined hands to form a startup SpotPlay to provide ease in entertainment through Wi-Fi technology, while people are on the move in vehicles.
Santosh Kumar identified a gap in the entertainment requirement during his frequent travel from Paris, especially during an overnight bus trip to Goa. “My overnight journeys in India gave me an idea on how erratic internet services Indian highways kept passengers away from personalised entertainment,” Santhosh Kumar says.
“Almost all of the passengers will be hooked to their smartphones and fiddling with music, videos, etc. So I realised a great opportunity to tap into,” he says.
When the founders did a preliminary research with regional transport association officials, they came to know that 97% of the buses in India don’t have TV screens.
“We decided to avail Wi-Fi technology to create Wi-Fi hotspot solutions to commuters in buses and cabs for streaming movies, songs and short films. We decided to create hardware, where the content can be stored and Wi-Fi streaming made possible via monitors placed in front of travellers seats,” he adds.
SpotPlay succeeded in monetising its business model by lowering hardware deployment cost to just about Rs 6,000 with over 80 mbps speed and memory capacity of one terabyte, which can be accessed by 12 people. “The hardware, size of a small jewellery box is packed with a router and a server that brings down the cost and space need further. Even though the cost was very high in the beginning, we succeeded in reducing the cost by using off-the-shelf device built on our own patented software and operating software (OS) planted it on the device,” Sai Krishna says.
The founders could address the simple needs of travellers like speed, video and sound quality, quick buffering and low cost. The hardware will store 100 movies, 100 songs and other short films and albums. “The fleet operators can download new content using access to the internet and store it in the device. We are also expanding our tie-up with various content providers,” he adds.
“Right now, around five travel operators in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu are using our solution. We are planning to expand our presence to Maharashtra, Goa, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh by the end of this year,” Santosh Kumar says.
The company raised its initial capital from Raj Iyer, a US-based NRI, and recently got support from the Coimbatore Institute of Engineering and Technology another. “We are planning to raise our first seed round of $500,000 soon, to meet our expansion plans,” he said.
SpotPlay founders also revealed they got a merger proposal from Ola. “We declined the proposal since they were looking at acqui-hiring only. Now we are solidifying our solution and expand the use case. We want this solution to be used in the education sector in remote villages via by aligning with edutech content providers,” he says.
Published 04 June 2017, 16:45 IST