Countdown to launch: 5......4......3......2......

If you didn't catch this already...

Hello! Welcome to the Beta launch of WeareIndia.TV

What you can expect. This will be an entertainment destination, but you won’t find your usual flavor of Bollywood or Hollywood entertainment. You will see films made by hard-working, self-motivated, extremely talented, and enthusiastic film-makers.

What you should know. We will be adding in a lot more content over the next 45 days. This is a platform for non-mainstream film. Most of it from India, some of it from elsewhere. We have received a near-overwhelming response; and the only times we’ve turned someone down is because the content seemed more amateurish, than professionally produced. Not anyone can upload on here, so we’re having to work very hard to manage the content screening and ingestion process.

What we believe. Is it really fair to brand this content ‘non-mainstream’? Probably not. If we have learned anything from the spate of video sharing web sites out there, including YouTube, it is this: non-mainstream is niche. Niche is appealing. Appeal is personal. And on the Internet, if you can make things personal for each member of your audience, you’re one jump ahead of the bread line.

Feedback. Please tell us what you like about the site(and the content), send us feedback(beta@weareindia.tv) and help us get this ready for the world outside. You might(and in a strange way, we hope you do) see bugs. Pretty please, with sugar on top, tell us about them, before you tell others about the site. Seriously, this is for-your-eyes-only thus far.

Finally. We’re not too hot about rolling out features without user feedback. Web 2.0 sites are in a perpetual state of beta, so we will gradually add in a foray of exciting features to enhance the WeareIndia.TV experience. What you will see on here is about 40% of our planned feature set for the next 3 months.
The site will be live as soon as we figure out this ONE bug that is totally getting on all our nerves. We expect this to happen at some point today(our chief technology officer just passed out from fatigue after 28 hours on the trot, so I’m waiting for him to be awake enough to grab a few more cans of Red Bull, before we get cracking again).


The fine print:

- WeareIndia.TV is targeted at users with a high speed broadband connection. Ahem…real broadband = 500 kbps upwards. So if you’re in India, then complaints about accessibility ought to go to the DoT, not to us.

- There’s a neat bookmarking tool on the site right now. It lets you bookmark the site on any of your favorite tagging/bookmarking sites. Or you could just CTRL+D it.

- We’re not particularly IE-friendly. We deal with browsers from a very technical point of view, and to put it real polite: IE sucks. But it’s a free world, so use the browser you prefer. If you ask us, we recommend Firefox.

- Finally, like all good netizens, we have a blog. It lives on Blogger (http://weareindia.blogspot.com). If you happen to find interest in what we say on there, then we’ve left an email subscription option for you on WeareIndia.