India is SMS Crazy

With an average 1.5 billion SMSes generated nationally every week, the Indian SMS saga is already the stuff of legend. If anything, the marriage of reality TV shows and mobile telephony now promises to set the national SMS turf on fire. Check this out — an 11-hour voting window (between 9 pm and 8 am) during last Friday’s Gala Round in Sony Entertainment TV India’s popular Indian Idol 3 music contest raked in well over three million SMSes from across India and key overseas locations like London, Dubai and Singapore. This was confirmed by a senior SET India official.

But here’s the juicy bit. The unofficial number doing the rounds is that at least five million votes hit Sony’s SMS gateway. Neither SET India nor the mobile guys are willing to confirm this. But at a flat Rs 3 per message, the SMS revenue alone during that 11-hour voting slot would work out to a cool Rs 1.5 crore. Add to that revenues from a few million voice message votes at Rs 6 each which also hit home. SET India circles confirmed that “bulk of the SMS traffic stemmed from Hutch and Airtel networks”.

Top honchos at SET India are truly gung-ho. “The total SMS-driven voting levels during the September 7 Gala episode itself was far in excess of three million. And these SMS votes came in just 11-hour voting window. Now that we’re down to the wire and people have to make a choice between the two finalists, Amit Paul and Prashant Tamang, I anticipate SMS-based voting to be 8-to-10 times the three million-plus SMS levels scaled last Friday. This is since the voting will be spread over two weeks till the Grand Finale on September 23,” said Mr Albert Almeida, who is executive vice-president and business head at SET India.

ET also spoke to a cross-section of the mobile flock, including Hutch, Airtel and BSNL, to get a fix on the real SMS impact of Indian Idol 3. While there’s a tight lid on all Indian Idol-related SMS numbers, leading mobile operators confirmed that SMS volumes were huge. It’s a different matter that SMS data trickling in from mobile operators tended to be more conservative than SET India’s projections.

Even as Indian Idol 3 hits the final stage, mobility circles expect voting lines to nationally generate five million SMSes in the final stretch from September 14-to-23 which will see several face-offs between the two finalists — Shillong’s Amit Paul and city cop, Prashant Tamang. For instance, a director at one of the country’s biggest cellular service providers said: “The two-and-a-half month long Indian Idol 3 context is likely to generate a shade over 15 million SMSes nationally, which is huge for a single TV show, but merely a drop in India’s SMS ocean, given that the national mobile market generates over 1.5 billion SMSes every week. In ARPU (average revenue per user) terms the increase will be a tiny 10 paise in gross revenue terms for mobile operators.”