Written by Om Malik
Posted Monday, December 4, 2006 at 4:02 PM PT

 

Go Jaman for Global Movie Downloads

Almost 18 months ago, Gaurav Dhillon, founder of Informatica, a Redwood City, Calif.-based enterprise software company, had just come back from a year-long stay in Argentina. He had left after guiding his first company through a gut-wrenching bust to a successful public offering. Spending his days dealing with the minutiae of the Sarbanes Oxley, however, was grinding him down.

He decided to take a year off, and spend time South of the border, learning Spanish and tango. Well, tango didn’t work out, but he did have a moment of clarity about what he wanted to do next: start an online video download company.

Like you, we also groaned when we first learnt about Dhillon’s idea. With over 300-odd video start-ups, not to mention all the money being spent by the likes of Apple and Wal-Mart and Google, we wondered if the world actually needed another online video download service.

“Everyone is focusing on that one square mile are in Hollywood,” says Dhillon — when there is a whole wide world whose content is in demand but is never distributed in the US. From French films to Bollywood potboilers, to the Kung Fu flicks from Hong Kong, the only place to buy (or rent) this content was ethnic grocery stores or small specialist video rental shops.

“This is the kind of content which gets little or no distribution in the US,” he argues. Being an immigrant himself, it was something Dhillon says he knew first hand. Convinced that it was a niche worth going after, he started Jaman, a San Francisco-based company. Given how we struggle to get Bollywood films, it is hard not to get excited about Jaman. Of course it helps that Dhillon has self-funded his company – to the tune of $3.5 million – a sign that the entrepreneur really believes in what he is doing.

“Our initial focus is on three immigrant communities – Latino community, people from Greater China and the Indian subcontinent,” says Dhillon. “These are underserved markets in North America, and many movies from those countries fail to get distribution in the US.” Eventually Jaman wants to become a distribution channel for European and US indie movies as well.

While it is not as lucrative mainstream market, Dhillon believes that it can become a multi-million-dollar-a-year business. Putamayo and Six Degrees are two record labels that have built profitable businesses by focusing on the non-mainstream world music acts.

But it wasn’t till Carlos Montalvo, a former member of the Apple QuickTime team joined, that things started to fall in place. Dhillon met Montalvo at a local film festival, and watched him participate in a panel on digital distribution.

“He was so spot on,” says Dhillon. After some arm-twisting Montalvo joined the company on January 2006 as senior vice president of operations. Eva Tse is the head of engineering. The three of them are the brain trust of the company, which uses BitTorrent-styled swarm casting technology (called Cascade) for its service. The company has built up its own network backend that includes super peers to help download the movies quickly. In addition, the company has built its own DRM and payment system. The 26-person company is split between San Francisco and Palo Alto.

We got a chance to try out the beta of the service, which at present has about 100 movies (and another 600 being encoded.) Jaman has signed deals with Celestial Pictures in Hong Kong for Chinese language and Venevision International, part of the Cisneros Group for Spanish-content. We will file a complete review later, but whatever little we tried was impressive, though needs some tweaks and polish.

You need to download a piece of software to make the videos play back on your computer (for now it only works on a computer). The good news is that the beta version works on both Mac and a PC. You can also watch a low-resolution version of the films on the web. The movies downloaded to your computer are high-definition, and can be rented for $1.99 for a week, or can be purchased for $4.99 a copy. At this time, due to international copyright regulations, the downloaded movies cannot be burned on a DVD.

I think that is the biggest knock on the service, but still, compared to about $15 you pay for a DVD of a foreign film, it is still worth it. There are a lot of shortcomings in the films on demand. For instance, there aren’t too many new movies — though we didn’t mind seeing Jackie Chan as an extra and Bruce Lee in his primal glory.

Well, instead of taking our word for it, why don’t you try the service. It might pleasantly surprise you.

 

Sphere
Topic: Online Video, Startups
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Comments & Trackbacks

  1. You dont provide a link to Jaman :-)
    http://www.jaman.com

    jm G on December 5th, 2006 at 3:38 am - Permalink

  2. It’s a great idea to go after the niche markets of non-mainstream media (read non-Hollywood). As in all media offerings, the adage - Content is King, is always true. It’ll be easier to procure distribution of non-mainstream media vs. traditional Hollywood.
    My concern is download times and associated user experience, HD download times are quite high (assuming H.264 encoding at 10 MBps). i.e. no instant gratification.
    All the best! You can sign me up as a beta customer ;–)

    Akash Pai on December 5th, 2006 at 9:53 am - Permalink

  3. Check out a similar site - Rajshri.com from India, they are streaming Bollywood movies over the internet (legally).

    mafu on December 6th, 2006 at 2:45 am - Permalink

  4. links for 2006-12-06…

    Jaman for Global Movie Downloads
    Bollywood produces double the content of Hollywood annually, but there hasn’t been an online marketplace for Indian or other national content online - until now. Interesting to see if this will ever expand into…

    Whatever's Interesting on December 6th, 2006 at 8:15 am - Permalink

  5. It is a nice and refreshing idea, it does standout from the me-too video startups. However, I do have some doubts on the scale and size of the market. I doubt if people will start using it instead of renting from neighborhood dvd stores. Read more of my thoughts at http://its4us2think.wordpress.com/

    its4us2think on December 8th, 2006 at 11:40 am - Permalink

  6. Jaman and lucarative world video segment…

    Om malik provides an introduction to jaman, which I was curious about (It is Informatica’s founder’s new company) . From the article:
    “Everyone is focusing on that one square mile are in Hollywood,” says Dhillon — when there is a whol…

    Let's think on December 12th, 2006 at 2:47 pm - Permalink

  7. […] Jaman is a good example of how online portals for non-Western film markets are just as, if not more slick, than anything being offered by American or European distributors. Three other companies — Rajshri.com, Nautanki.tv and Wilderness Films India — are also taking advantage of the new distribution models online, each in a different way. […]

    NewTeeVee » India’s Online Content Growing Quickly on January 9th, 2007 at 8:52 pm - Permalink

  8. […] Jaman — The site is a way to watch ‘world cinema’ online — all those foreign flicks that don’t come to your local theater. We profiled the company last year, and they say they have over 1,000 films under contract and 200 films live on the site - $1.99 to rent, $4.99 to buy. The CEO shows off new social features like an in-movie commentary and dicussion window and social searching. […]

    GigaOM » DEMO 2007 Live on January 31st, 2007 at 10:49 am - Permalink

  9. […] Jaman, the global movie download service that Om profiled here last year, got a star turn at the DEMO conference in sunny SoCal today. Our Katie F. is at DEMO and is live blogging, doing a quick take on the rapid-fire presentations. Check out her ongoing report today over on GigaOM. Topic: Online Video Tags: Jaman, Demo […]

    NewTeeVee » Jaman Gets a Star Turn at DEMO on January 31st, 2007 at 1:49 pm - Permalink

  10. […] Another startup we’ve covered, GridNetworks, says it can handle streaming through its command-and-control distribution, without creating a dichotomy like VeriSign is. We’ve also covered of Jaman and Skyrider (see also a great comment on another post about the company). […]

    NewTeeVee » VeriSign launching CDN-P2P combo on February 13th, 2007 at 12:33 pm - Permalink

  11. Cheap flights europe flights soma….

    Cheap air flights cheep flights soma….

    Air cheap flight flights soma. on March 2nd, 2007 at 11:50 am - Permalink

  12. [...] I wrote about them back in December, and with the company being now exactly 100 days old, I wanted to catch up with them. In their new sprawling, if somewhat sparsely populated office, what I ended up seeing was a big and pleasant surprise and it involves AppleTV. [...]

    GigaOM Jaman, now playing on AppleTV « on June 28th, 2007 at 10:10 am - Permalink

  13. [...] folks at Jaman (see our early profile) have developed a plug-in of sorts for Apple TV that basically installs on the Apple TV box, and [...]

    NewTeeVee Jaman Hacks Its Way onto Apple TV « on June 28th, 2007 at 11:04 am - Permalink

  14. [...] I wrote about them back in December, and with the company being now exactly 100 days old, I wanted to catch up with them. In their new sprawling, if somewhat sparsely populated office, what I ended up seeing was a big and pleasant surprise and it involves AppleTV. [...]

    Jaman, now playing on AppleTV on June 30th, 2007 at 12:46 am - Permalink

  15. I just found a link that will give you 4 free downloads on Jaman

    http://www.jaman.com/promo/movie

    James on August 6th, 2007 at 6:36 pm - Permalink

  16. [...] isn’t the only online video startup that’s using blogging to highlight its content. Jaman, a San Mateo, Calif.-based Joost competitor, has already hired “Jamanista,” and [...]

    From Grand Theft Auto to Joost Jockey « NewTeeVee on August 26th, 2007 at 11:30 pm - Permalink

  17. so glad to read this article!

    days before today i used http://www.coplace.com to find and download movies. now jaman represents very cute prices.

    still i find it more attractive because it gives a chance to burn movies an CD’s.

    Видео on October 3rd, 2007 at 6:41 am - Permalink

  18. This is a very intersting concept. It will be awesome to see what the web looks like in a few years with the portability of new movie reviews.

    John on October 31st, 2007 at 9:01 am - Permalink

  19. [...] read more | digg story [...]

    Techs Or More » Jaman - A New Global Movie Download Service on November 7th, 2007 at 7:48 am - Permalink

  20. [...] new site for foreign films — I’d like to see them tackle indie US content as well.read more | digg story Share This Related post: Annual St. George marathon set for Saturday; 6,800 runners [...]

    Jaman - A New Global Movie Download Service : : Fair Proxy Web on November 25th, 2007 at 9:34 pm - Permalink

  21. [...] like normal and practically forgot about the special occasion. It all started with stories about Jaman and Praying Mantis Girl (which we still get random traffic for, by the way) on December 4, 2006. [...]

    Happy Birthday to Us! « NewTeeVee on December 4th, 2007 at 10:33 pm - Permalink

  22. [...] purchase international and independent films from online movie distribution company Jaman (see our profile of the company). The service will work on broadband-connected TiVo Series2 and Series3 boxes, with [...]

    TiVo Gets Jaman with Indie Movies « NewTeeVee on January 17th, 2008 at 8:20 am - Permalink

  23. I think it’s a great idea and will catch on, with the price $4.99 a download as opposed to $15.00 per Dvd being a major factor in it’s success.

    Steve Whelan on February 13th, 2008 at 7:13 am - Permalink

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