This Bangladeshi startup wants to be Hulu for local content

Ahad Bhai and Navidul Haq are childhood friends and co-founders of video on demand startup BongoBD. For them, entrepreneurship is a trait that runs in their blood. Both come from families with business interests and were thus predisposed to running their own ventures. Their first entrepreneurial endeavor came while both of them were undergraduate students in the United States and wanted to “do something fun.” Inspired by the wildly popular game HotorNot, Bhai and Haq bought a custom script and started a local version called DhakaHotties. The site soon went viral among both local and expatriate Bangladeshis.

While Bhai and Haq had an enjoyable experience running DhakaHotties, they realized it was becoming “too big to handle.” The site was accessed by tens of thousands of users every day and they found themselves in the position of having to invest in servers and maintenance to keep it running. They were still students, and had only started the site as a side-project, so they didn’t find it worthwhile to continue and shut it down.

Fast forward ten years and both friends found themselves back in their home city of Dhaka. The experience of running DhakaHotties was something they wished to recreate, but this time they were determined to build a solid, viable product which they could monetize and run efficiently at the same time. After some deliberation they decided on a video on demand service. “Content is a huge market all over the world. We were confident we would be able to create something similar in Bangladesh,” says Bhai.

To help validate their idea, the founders spoke with executives in the media, entertainment, and telecommunication industries. Everyone they approached seemed receptive to the idea, which affirmed their initial view that there was demand for such services in the local market. “That gave us confidence, and we proceeded to purchase content rights,” adds Bhai.

It took the founders approximately two years to secure rights for all the content on their portal. It includes local movies, television shows, documentaries, music videos, and the like. Their library is incredibly vast and diverse, and has content dating back as far as the early 1950s. It is also apparent that they benefitted from being the first movers as the concept of digital entertainment was completely non-existent. This helped the founders lock in contracts and avoid lengthy negotiations stemming from interest from rival startups. Bhai reveals that existing contracts for content rights completely overlooked the digital sphere, allowing them to circumvent media companies which held the rights for other mediums and talk to production houses directly. “For most people we spoke to, digital meant a DVD disc. It was a grey area.”

Acting locally, thinking regionally

Currently, users can access BongoBD in a variety of ways. There is a website, for desktop and laptop users, as well as iOS and Android apps for mobile users. However, as 75 percent of Bangladeshi mobile users still access the internet through 2G networks, the team has also put together a WAP platform to cater to this segment. This platform doesn’t have the same full-length movies and television shows as the more data-hungry channels, but relies mainly on shorter clips and memes to keep viewers interested. With 40 million mobile internet users and growing, Bangladesh is on the cusp of an internet revolution, a fact that has not escaped the attention of the founders.

Currently, BongoBD is free to access, but there are plans of introducing a premium service in the near future. If users opt to pay for the service, they will have unlimited access to ad-free content. However, for those who want to stream for free, there will be an intermittent display of advertisements. The good news is that the founders are not considering to allow only paid users to access their content. They believe the freemium model works in their favor, and are not discouraged by it.

BongoBD has also signed partnership agreements with local telecommunication companies, an arrangement that suits both parties, according to Bhai. Telcos are interested in promoting data plans for their high-speed internet services, and a video-streaming portal allows them the opportunity to do so. Furthermore, for the startup, telecommunication companies can provide the reach and access to millions of potential customers, which otherwise they would have to invest massive amounts of marketing cash to obtain. There’s also a deal in the pipeline where Samsung phones sold in Bangladesh would have the BongoBD app pre-installed.

The startup has impressive regional ambitions. The founders are already in talks to host live events, as well as rolling out services in Sri Lanka, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, United States, and Nepal. Their target is both the Bangladeshi diaspora and countries that are currently bereft of a video on-demand service.“We want to be aggressive as timing is key in this industry,” says Bhai. “The quicker we acquire content, the better our chances of success.”