YuppTV Founder Uday Reddy had his career all chalked out. In 2006, while serving as a Director for Nortel, where he was responsible for Cable and Wireless Sales in the Caribbean, Reddy had reached a mid-career stage. He already had spent 14 years in the Telecom industry, and he was ready to take a break to study more.
Reddy planned on getting a mid-career degree from Kellog’s School of Management. However, his first day at school made him drop out.
“The day I was to begin classes in Fall 2006, I consulted the person who had interviewed me there, about a business plan I had. After talking to him, I was determined more than ever that this idea could work. So, I just went off to set up my own company, now called YuppTV,” shares Reddy.
In Reddy’s words, YuppTV was neither a miracle nor a Eureka. It solved the real-world problem of Indians living abroad. For instance, 45% of the population living in Trinidad and Tobago are Indians who had no access to Indian television content.
“I really believe that TV is a great source of knowing or keeping in touch with one’s culture. Indians living abroad particularly want to acquaint their children with this culture. This is why I was quite sure that the idea of live TV would resonate with Indian expats,” shares Reddy.
He launched YuppTV back in 2007. Known for his deep market understanding and respect for the potential of new technologies, Reddy steered his company towards areas where there was business.
“I envisioned a company that converges technologies in providing virtual home-based access to entertainment, information, and communication anytime, anywhere across the globe. And YuppTV came into existence with an identity that was possible only through continuous expansion and innovation,” he adds.
Getting the right sales strategy
Due to the monopoly of a large corporation, Reddy’s team had to struggle initially in sales and expansion. Retaining customers was a constant challenge, and pulling in money for marketing was harder.
So, in 2010, Reddy sold off a plot of land from his personal assets, took loans from friends, and kept the business running. He modified the sales strategy, while slowly building a larger customer base targeting the Indian diaspora living abroad.
YuppTV today is watched in more than 400 million households across the world with more than 8 million app downloads. The Internet-only TV streams Indian content worldwide.
Launching OTT buckets
The very founding idea of YuppTV was Internet-only TV. As a result, when the OTT revolution took the world by storm, his team already had enough data and an Internet-only business structure.
Reddy doesn’t want to get into the business of creating and approving good or bad content. His vision for OTT is clear – create content buckets from the existing content, and serve it through a technology platform. He sees a clear problem in the current OTT models – people end up paying for too many subscriptions on entertainment.
“Imagine earlier people would subscribe to one cable TV agent. Now they are paying different subscriptions for different OTTs because each family’s interests may be different,” he says.
YuppTV Scope solves this problem by offering an OTT aggregator platform where viewers will only need a single subscription fee, sign up and discover content based on their interests. They will have the freedom to create content buckets just like they did back in the cable TV days.
YuppTV Scope’s business model is to partner through broadband telcos in the future to make this work at a larger scale. Reddy and his team have built the technology, and have plans of licensing the platform to many telcos, ISPs, and OTT broadcasters. “We have premium customers in the segment globally who are using our technology,” he says.