Sricharan Iyengar, VP (Sales and Marketing) for ESPN has told the Hindu that ESPN is working on offering sports news in Tamil and Bengali, as a part of its Mobile ESPN service. The story also quotes Nazara Technologies CEO Nitish Mittersain as estimating the regional VAS market at around Rs. 200 crore. Mittersain splits regional VAS as follows: Music (60 percent), Graphics (25 percent), Gaming (5 percent), and Mythology and others (10 percent). Nazara and Hungama Mobile plan to beef up regional content operations, with Hungama planning to set up as many as 12 offices in the next 2-3 months to focus on regional content, and Nazara recruiting 10-12 content developers.
The story also mentions some issues that hinder growth of regional content: the inability of people to understand how to download content on their phones, language-handset compatibility, lack of local content, cost of handsets and most interestingly from a content providers perspective - lack of adequate research.