With bandwidth cheaper than ever, the international tech market booming, and investors eager to find some new tax shelter in which to dump their millions, the internet is in the midst of a multimedia boom not seen since the late 1990s. And hey, we all know how well that ended, right? Yes, there's probably another massive crash coming, but that doesn't mean that in the meantime, office drones can't kill those long empty hours between lunch and five o'clock with exciting new ventures like Hulu and now Jaman.
Founded by Indian-American enterpreneur Gaurav Dhillon and backed by Hearst money, Jaman is an online on-demand video rental service, similar to those offered by Apple and Netflix, but focusing on an entirely different market. Jaman will, with the exception of a few Golden Age blockbusters that were out of copyright control (like Audrey Hepburn's Charade) focus on independent films for an English-speaking audience, and foreign-language titles -- espeically the wildly popular Bollywood genre so beloved by a growing Indian diaspora -- for the audience it's hoping to reach overseas. Hoping to tap into the underserved markets in tech-savvy countries like Brazil, Russia, India and China, where most people rely on DVD pirates for most of their movie needs, Dhillon is focusing on foreign language movies as both a source of cheap profit and a means towards building an audience. To help build that audience, they're set to offer an introductory deal that will applie to indie fans everywhere in the U.S. as well: free (well, ad-supported) access to a library of over a thousand indie films via the site's streaming browser windows.
Lest anyone get too excited over the prospect, Jaman is also hard-selling the 'social networking' aspect of their site, using those magical words, speaking of the 1990s, that everyone seems to find necessary but no one seems to have thought up a way to make money with so far. Still, the prospect of at-will callups of hundreds of inde flicks will keep us interested in the site...until the Great Crash of 2010, anyway.
