Meet the Indian who's fuelling Asia’s online video consumption

Nickhil Jakatdar is a successful entrepreneur who probably none of us know about while he’s partly responsible for the ease in which we watch the online OTT (over-the-top) content on our smartphones. Jakatdar, based in Silicon Valley is the founder of Vuclip, which launched its premium OTT video service, Viu in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, the Middle East and Thailand, recently.


Nickhil was born and raised in Pune, Maharashtra and went to the U.S. for his PhD at Berkeley. A complete tech- enthusiast Nickhil has over 40 patents from his work at Timbre Technologies and was responsible for developing an industry standard in the field of Scatterometry.

“Technology is at the core of everything that we do, which helps us to provide the best of content experience to our consumer,” says Nickhil who described how their path-breaking technological solutions are used by leading online content players.

“In markets like India, our technology is behind "No Buffering" while consumers view mobile video. Dynamic Adaptive Transcoding enables the simultaneous transcoding or optimization of the content to each specific device and dynamically adapts the video stream to the constantly varying bandwidth of carrier and Wi-Fi networks,” explains Jakatdar whose focus in India is now shifting to original content.

Vuclip has been investing heavily in South-east asian markets but in the past year, their focus has been on India. Some of the original series like What the Duck- based on cricket, Gehraiyaan and Spolight co-produced by Bollywood ace director Vikram Bhatt are targeted at the Indian Millenials. Nickhil has also seen traction from other local languages which led to original series in Telugu like pillA which is a drama focused on the female audience.

“The local content is responsible for garnering 35% traffic on our platform in India and our focus will remain in creating content for the online audience. We are seeing high levels of engagement with Indian audience because they crave original content at high production value,” Nickhil thinks that the OTT market will belong to the player that not just delivers good content but also understands the indigenous market’s needs.