Live Video Infrastructure Platform 100ms Raises $20 Mn in Funding Led By Alpha Wave Incubation (AWI)

Live video infrastructure startup announces an update that will help empower businesses to deploy enterprise-grade live video apps in hours.

• Beyond Zoom: 100ms is enabling product creators to add live video interactions for online classrooms, virtual events, audio rooms, online communities, telehealth, and more
• Traction: Hot on the heels of the $4.5m seed round in October 2021, 100ms reports 20x growth in product usage in the last quarter

Live video infrastructure startup, 100ms, today announced their Series A funding round of $20M led by Alpha Wave Incubation (AWI). AWI is backed by DisruptAD, ADQ’s venture platform, and managed by Alpha Wave Global. The round is joined by Matrix Partners India and LocalGlobe, along with participation from existing investors Accel and Strive.vc.

“Zoom and similar products helped us through the surge in digital adoption. We are missing one very important fact though - real 1:1 experiences cannot always be boxed into Zoom video tiles. Our belief is, going forward all companies will embed video experiences into their apps. 100ms provides the best-in-class infrastructure to power these video experiences.”, shares Abhinav Chaturvedi, Partner at Accel, on the continuation of the partnership from the seed stage.

“Video-based solutions will be a key driver in the development of B2B and B2C products in a multitude of verticals. By abstracting the complexities of video streaming, 100ms has created a sophisticated, yet easy-to-use product for companies to be able to add high-end, live engagement tools in a cost-effective manner. The market for this is global and through its differentiated GTM, 100ms is poised to be the market leader in this space” Anirudh Singh, Managing Director at Falcon Edge's Alpha Wave Incubation, commented on leading the round.

With customers like WhiteHat Jr, Circle, Paytm Insider, Frontrow, and Kutumb, 100ms announced that it has witnessed over 20X growth in usage metrics over the last quarter. With this round of funding, the company aims to help developers build and deploy enterprise-class video applications in hours.

"Mainstream video conferencing solutions are good enough, but not best-in-class for someone building a video-first business. Whether it’s online fitness, e-learning, gaming, or shopping, we’re very early in the journey of video-first experiences and the 100ms team has built a great product with phenomenal early traction. We’re excited to partner with Kshitij and Aniket in building a video-first future." said Pranay Desai, Principal, Matrix India.

"Building and managing video infrastructure at scale is a non-trivial problem for most organizations”, said Kshitij Gupta, CEO at 100ms and former VP, Engineering at Disney-Hotstar. “Our goal is to make it easy for businesses of all sizes to deliver deeper-than-physical live video experiences within their products in less than half-dozen lines of code."

About 100ms

100ms aims to bring real-life interactions to the virtual world by providing world-class developer tooling for live video. Founded by engineers that built the video infrastructure at Facebook and Disney, 100ms’s vision is to build rich, bespoke, and deeper-than-physical experiences for businesses and people.

For more information, visit https://100ms.live or follow @100mslive.

Netflix Rolls Out Rs 199 Mobile-only Plan to woo Indian Users

Premium video streaming company Netflix on Wednesday announced a Rs 199 mobile-only plan in India as it looks to woo viewers amid intense competition from Amazon Prime Videos and other local players.

The video content platform, which had been testing the mobile-only plan for several months in India, has also restructured its three existing plans.

Indians spend 30 per cent of their time on entertainment, they are consuming content on the go and in their homes. Members in India watch content on their mobile phones more than anywhere else in the world, Netflix Director Product Innovation Ajay Arora told reporters here.

He added that more people sign up for Netflix service on mobile phones in India more than any other country. "The mobile plan for Rs 199 a month is made for India. Users will have access to the same unlimited standard definition (SD), ad-free content under this plan," he said adding that this will help the company expand to smaller cities in the country.

The company has tested similar mobile-only plans in few other markets; but as of now, the offering is being announced in India only, Arora said.In India, Netflix has partners like Hathway, Bharti Airtel and ACT Fibernet to take its services to customers through these networks.

Recently, during an investor call, Netflix had said it believes that growth in the Indian market is a marathon; and that the company is witnessing steady progress here.

With the Rs 199 plan, Netflix hopes to further expand its business in a market where Pay TV average revenue per user (ARPU) is low (below $5).

Netflix, which is witnessing sluggish growth in its home market, is betting on markets like India to drive growth. The company has over 148 million paid memberships in over 190 countries. It doesn't disclose country-specific subscriber numbers.

Online content consumption in India has seen massive growth with data plans becoming more affordable. Data rates in India are among the cheapest globally.While there is a growing trend of consuming these on-demand content on television, a significant number of people watch content on smartphones.

While Netflix plays in the premium content streaming space, it competes with the likes of Amazon Prime Video, Hotstar and even YouTube, along with other local players in the Indian market.

Amazon Prime Videos, Hotstar and Zee5 offer services at Rs 999 annually.

The competition in the video-on-demand space has intensified, especially, after the launch of Reliance Jio's services as data tariffs have come down drastically in the country.

Players like ALTBalaji as well as vernacular platforms like Hoichoi are actively expanding their library with original programming to tap into the Indian market.

Netflix's global paid membership grew by 2.7 million in the second quarter, less than the 5.5 million in the year-ago period and its own forecast of five million for the June 2019 quarter.

In the third quarter, Netflix said it expects to grow by 7 million paid memberships (0.8 million in the US and 6.2 million internationally) compared to an addition of 6.1 million subscribers in the year-ago period. PTI

India Quotient, Shunwei Capital Bets $1 Mn In Bengaluru Based Clip App

Bengaluru-based digital media video startup, Clip App has raised close to $1 million in a seed round led by India Quotient and Shunwei Capital, a China-based investment firm.

The company plans to utilize freshly infused funds to enhance it’s product features for the video only app. The startup which claims have an organic growth of over 100,000 users within three months, largely from tier-II and tier-III markets plans to focus on acquiring users over the next two to three years.

Commenting on the development, Anand Lunia, partner at India Quotient told ET, “Lot of social media companies have started and shut down in India, it’s not a space where companies see a high success ratio. Besides this, investors are also interested in seeing innovative social media companies come out of India for Indians, so there is potential in terms of funding for this space. However, since the space is competitive, staying relevant is a challenge.”

Lunia believes that this space remains competitive and challenging and soon Indian entrepreneurs will learn a way to build social networks specifically for non English speaking audience in India.

Founded in March 2017 by Nav Agarwal, Clip App is presently growing organically, as the company is focusing on enhancing the product and building upon its features before aggressively marketing Clip App.

According to the Agarwal, the app specifically caters to tier-II and III user's focuses on Hindi speaking users.

Nav Agarwal, Founder, Clip App said, “They spend over 20 minutes a day on the app. And a lot of videos that are currently on the app are the kind of videos one would find shared on WhatsApp or videos individuals take randomly, could be dance, drama, stunts.Basically, one time watch videos. These users technically represent 95% of India.”

Agarwal further said that they saw the future in video when the team noticed that over 80% of Facebook’s newsfeeds consisted of videos, Instagram made a shift to taking video more seriously and Snapchat as a video medium.

StoryXpress Automating Pro-Video Creation Easy for Startups & SMBs

Having a good product is not enough nowadays. A good product becomes a successful product only through its rightful promotion and with increasing reach of Internet the medium is being increasingly used by consumers to discover new businesses and products online.

Nowadays having a website and videos are the two most famous means for businesses to gain visibility online. Websites have now become a common thing but people are still skeptical about spending money on making videos but with StoryXpress they can leave all their worries behind. StoryXpress is a cloud based video creation service that makes creation of video content an easy and money efficient task. Its first product helps the businesses to convert their audio, video clips, photos, tweets and texts into beautiful and attractive videos. Videos have proved to be a great promotional tool in today’s internet age.

The process involved in making these videos has just three easy steps. The first involves choosing a theme for the video. Currently StoryXpress provides three themes for products, services and apps. It’s is going to add more themes very soon. A theme should be chosen by keeping the kind of business you’re into in mind.

The second step involves uploading images, for example, if it’s an app, one needs to upload the screenshots of the app; similarly if it is for a service, you'll be required to screenshots of the website. And further it also provides opportunities to create a store or product video by clicking some photographs of the store or product and then uploading them.

The third and the final step involves sharing your videos and acquiring new customers through it. The video created can be embedded in your website and easily shared on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and various other social networking sites.

StoryXpress is a bootstrapped company started in 2013. The company is a product of hardwork of basically four people, Ankit Mishra, Mudit Tanwani, Sanyam Kapoor and Chinmay Jindal.

The Hyderabad based startup specializes in API, StoryBoard and automated video creation. The startup is actually a product of a campus idea and according to the founders this has actually worked in favor of them as being a college startup, no one expects a salary from you, so you don’t have to pay yourself. According to them, their door room doubles up as their office and they even get access to free Wi-Fi.

StoryXpress Automating Pro-Video Creation Easy for Startups & SMBs

Having a good product is not enough nowadays. A good product becomes a successful product only through its rightful promotion and with increasing reach of Internet the medium is being increasingly used by consumers to discover new businesses and products online.

Nowadays having a website and videos are the two most famous means for businesses to gain visibility online. Websites have now become a common thing but people are still skeptical about spending money on making videos but with StoryXpress they can leave all their worries behind. StoryXpress is a cloud based video creation service that makes creation of video content an easy and money efficient task. Its first product helps the businesses to convert their audio, video clips, photos, tweets and texts into beautiful and attractive videos. Videos have proved to be a great promotional tool in today’s internet age.

The process involved in making these videos has just three easy steps. The first involves choosing a theme for the video. Currently StoryXpress provides three themes for products, services and apps. It’s is going to add more themes very soon. A theme should be chosen by keeping the kind of business you’re into in mind.

The second step involves uploading images, for example, if it’s an app, one needs to upload the screenshots of the app; similarly if it is for a service, you'll be required to screenshots of the website. And further it also provides opportunities to create a store or product video by clicking some photographs of the store or product and then uploading them.

The third and the final step involves sharing your videos and acquiring new customers through it. The video created can be embedded in your website and easily shared on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and various other social networking sites.

StoryXpress is a bootstrapped company started in 2013. The company is a product of hardwork of basically four people, Ankit Mishra, Mudit Tanwani, Sanyam Kapoor and Chinmay Jindal.

The Hyderabad based startup specializes in API, StoryBoard and automated video creation. The startup is actually a product of a campus idea and according to the founders this has actually worked in favor of them as being a college startup, no one expects a salary from you, so you don’t have to pay yourself. According to them, their door room doubles up as their office and they even get access to free Wi-Fi.

How I Met Your Neta - Video

The current Lok Sabha elections in our country has been an emotional roller coaster for everybody. The number of first time and youth voters casting their ballots has led to a big splurge in the percentage of voter turnouts across the country.

Just like recent times, Popular Media has played a very crucial part in changing the mindsets and fueling the debate for good governance and due credit should be given to them.

In the video above by TVFRecycleBin in association with ADR- Association For Democratic Reforms, the TVF guys ask the youth of India simple questions to test their political awareness. With everybody having opinions about politics and politicians it was interesting see very basic knowledge about current politics.

But under this entire garb of sensationalism lies a truth that is not only stark but very difficult to comprehend. "TVF online entertainment network, part of TVFGroup, a leading company, at the edge of media innovations..." The Viral Fever with its underlying power of creating original and unbiased content in association with ADR- Association For Democratic Reforms launched a survey/campaign called "How I Met your Neta". The idea was simple: To ask the young voters of our country of the basic knowledge about electorate like candidates, issues, manifestos, etc and most of them were clueless.

An initiative by TVF, FAQ's "How i Met Your Neta" aims at fulfilling that void between "Cast your Vote" and "Cast your Vote responsibly after finding out, who are you voting for?"

The video has been trending on twitter, Facebook and youtube for the last week or so and has already garnered over 3,25,000 views

Arunabh Kumar, Founder of TVF Group was quoted as saying "With this, we have been able to make at least half a million people more politically aware. We look forward to make "TVF-RecycleBin" a one stop channel for all cool non-fiction content."

Funny: LG new ultra-HD 84" television Prank Video

LG, in order to advertise its brand new product - 84 inches Ultra HD TV which is one of largest screen TV available in the market and clearer picture than any other brands. So in order prove this features of picture clarity LG set-up a fake scenario and made prank out of the regular people to get their reaction.

LG created a job interview room with fake window which is actually LG ultra-HD 84" TV fitted as window showing a still scene of city skyline and faking it as window to city below. In the video all job seekers walk into the room for a job interview and sit across from the fake window in front of an actor who is playing interviewer.

While the Ultra HDTV window still showing scene of city skyline, all of a sudden the screen shows a bright light starts to shine out of the top left corner of the TV and further an asteroid kind of thing approaching the city below giving a feeling of end of the earth. Thereafter the interviewees just got scared and try to run out as the dust cloud from asteroid collision approach towards window of room, which actually is just LG HDTV screen. Finally the people calm down as the see the LG logo on window realizing that it's just a screen and not a window.

LG 84 Ultra High Definition Cinema 3D SMART TV with Built in Wi-Fi is available in India for whopping price tag of Rs.17,00,000.

This advertisement or video prank become viral within few days till now got 9 million views on YouTube. Interestingly LG has also made one more prank in the past which is elevator prank in which LG created an elevator floor out of computer monitors. When someone got on the elevator, the monitors made it look like the elevator floor was collapsing underneath the person's feet.

Coca-Cola Small World Machines is Really Interesting

Coca-Cola, a renowned soft-drink maker world-wide has come up with new marketing gimmick which is really interesting and beautifully give an effort to bring two nations together and when the nations are India & Pakistan it become much more interesting - two siblings tear apart in year 1947 and now used to live with conflicts.



Coca-Cola devised a high-tech vending machines installed in two popular shopping malls in Lahore city of Pakistan and New Delhi of India, two cities separated by only 325 miles. These machines are called - "Small World Machines" which provides a live communications portal (live streaming video) with 3D touchscreen technology to project a streaming video feed onto the vending machine screen while simultaneously filming through the unit to capture a live emotional exchange such as - wave, touch hands, draw a peace sign or dance along with of-course sharing Coca-Cola.



This Small World machines project a streaming video feed onto the vending machine screen while simultaneously filming through the unit to capture a live emotional exchange.

People from both the countries are liking it and sharing peace & love messages despite of their political conflicts.

Via - coca-colacompany.com