MUMBAI: FastFilmz Media India, a digital start-up with headquarters in Bengaluru and London, has launched a subscription-driven movie streaming app called fastfilmz dedicated to South Indian films. The subscription fee has been priced at Rs 10 per week and Rs 30 a month.
fastfilmz has been co-founded by Dominic Charles and Karam Malhotra, the co-CEOs of the company. It has been funded by multiple angel investors from the US and Europe. The service is offering 150+ hit HD Tamil movies with unlimited downloads. It will also add Telugu movies to the app by the end of this year. Currently, the app is available on Google Play.
“While conducting our market study, we saw that the consumption of regional cinema in India is as large as Bollywood, but not one single service dedicated to this devoted audience. We are launching with the best catalogue of recent and classic Tamil movies featuring all the top heroes and we will be adding 5–10 more titles each and every week,” says fastfilmz co-CEO and co-founder Karam Malhotra.
The company has tied up with the four largest network service providers in Tamil Nadu, namely Aircel, Airtel, Vodafone and Idea. To simplify the payment model, the subscription amount will be deducted from subscribers’ talk-time balance. fastfilmz has partnered V-Nova for its PERSEUS Technology, which is touted to be the world’s fastest video compression technology, to solve issues of high data costs for downloads and buffering when streaming.
V-Nova’s PERSEUS allows fastfilmz to provide full movie downloads at as low as 150MB data per 2.5-hour movie versus >600MB data by any other app. V-Nova is a London-headquartered software company providing advanced video compression technology and software solutions. The technology also enables streaming of quality video over the 2G networks that 70% of India’s consumers use for internet access.
“We noticed that small-town, regional consumers didn’t have access to fast networks and affordable data to watch movies on their smartphones at ease. By partnering V-Nova exclusively, we have rights to use their world-class video compression technology PERSEUS, which enables us to provide HD-quality movies to our users at affordable data costs. Moreover, the technology has helped us increase our potential customer base four times, from a possible 30 million customers using 3G to over 120 million customers using 2G and 3G,” Malhotra noted.
source:televisionpost