We covered NyooTV last year, a video content aggregator that boasted of the big partnerships with content distributors like Rajshri TV, Star, Hungama, Tubaah, BigAdda, BigFlix, Daily motion, Eros etc. Indeed the attempt to get full length movies and TV shows online is appreciable and shows the strength of a well networked team. As of date NyooTV has a 150K+ videos most of which are licensed. 
After about 8 months of launch NyooTV is getting about 3K visitors daily and although the Facebook fan page is abuzz with 750K+ fans the links to fan page on the site are broken. Clearly the company has spent too much in making Zuckerberg a richer man. Why? Well the site is wanting to take an “Online Social TV” tag and the most important part in being the “Online Social TV” is being “Social” and getting lots of fans on Facebook, right? Wrong!
The important part is getting “Online” right. After a lot of pitches from the startup i decided to give NyooTV a try. By the time the homepage loaded, i had got my answer. I checked Alexa and YSlow and was reconfirmed of my observation. NyooTV’s homepage is 1.8MB in download size, compare this to Youtube which is only 190KB. The same story is true for internal pages as well. The video took just too much time to load and i lost my patience.
In attempt to make the site “social” there is a new feature called Shout box which is anything but social.
Even after so many partnership for content, NyooTV forgot about its core that something as heavy as a video platform has to get its technology right first. Specially in a bandwidth dry geography like India. Today all NyooTV has to boast about is the fanbase of 750K+, growing at 5K per day. My maths says about Rs.5Mn spending in Facebook ads.
All in all a typical case of big money, well networked people but a bad product. May be the team relied too much on exclusive licensed content to start with, which in today’s piracy driven web is of little value.
NyooTV will be announcing a fresh round of investments soon and I hope the team utilizes the moolah in getting the technology right. The site needs to get its act right in SEO as well, which has been the major source of traffic for any content play. It’s not too late and a well done act will surely reap the benefits.
Your Take? Are money driven startups destroying the ecosystem?
PS: Dear Nyootv, No hard feelings. Hope to see a better product strategy in near future. Wish you luck.
[Naman is a startup enthusiast and has worked with couple of Indian startups as Product Manager. He is the founder of FindYogi]
