Jagran Group signs up with Marcellus to power online video

WEBWIRE – Monday, February 1, 2010

India’s second largest circulated newspaper rolls out video on flagship property: Jagran.com

February 01, 2010 – Marcellus Inc. announced today its first major news property sign-up, with the addition of the Jagran Group to its customer base. The announcement follows the launch of video delivery on Jagran.com, powered by the Marcellus platform. Leveraging the Amazon Cloudfront CDN, Marcellus empowers Jagran to serve high quality, buffer-free video experiences to a massive global audience- with a publishing workflow customized to match the enterprise level requirements of a large news organization.

“The history of Jagran speaks for itself,” said Preetam Mukherjee, president and chief executive officer at Marcellus. “With an offline audience of over 50 million daily readers and an online audience of over 1.5 million monthly viewers, Jagran is superbly poised to create exciting new business opportunities with online video. We are privileged to be supporting these video initiatives at an organization that has documented the daily history of the largest democracy in the world since 1942.”

In less than two weeks since the introduction of video, Jagran has served well over 300 hours of programming from its flagship portal, http://www.jagran.com. By adopting the Marcellus Video Platform, Jagran plans to leverage the tremendous scale economics of video delivery from the Amazon Cloudfront CDN, and increase the level of audience engagement across all its online media properties.

“In our search for a video platform, there were a few things we simply could not compromise upon.” said Sukirti Gupta, CEO at MMI Online, which manages Jagran.com. “The first, and foremost, was quality- there is no excuse for delivering inferior quality video experiences to audiences. Second was cost- we needed an economical solution that could help us build a viable business model around our online video initiatives. Third- we needed a platform that could easily integrate with our content management system powered by Yahoo. Finally- we wanted to work with an agile team that is extremely competent with the business and technology of online video”.
“After months of evaluating online video platforms from across the world, we settled on Marcellus as the platform of our choice. They’re an exciting bunch, extremely passionate about this space, with the ability to execute fast. Once we signed off with them, Marcellus took us from zero to launch in three weeks, which was a pleasant surprise in of itself. We are absolutely delighted with our choice and look forward to pioneering the online video revolution in India with the Marcellus team backing us up.”

With the successful launch of Jagran.com, Marcellus continues its pledge to help businesses and web sites across the world deliver high quality video to their audiences, at extremely affordable price points. The company plans to drive deeper into the North American market in 2010, and extend its footprint among small and mid-sized businesses looking to deliver online video- a market where simplicity, quality and cost continue to be an under-served combination.

EDITIONS AND PRICING

The Marcellus service is available in three Editions- BASIC, PLUS and PREMIUM. Each edition offers a set of functionality geared towards organizations with varying needs. In addition, Marcellus offers five Infrastructure plans, from 10 GB to 1.5 TB in monthly bandwidth capacity. Enterprise customers requiring larger bandwidth volumes are set up with custom infrastructure plans tailored to their needs. Using a combination of the BASIC edition and 10 GB bandwidth plan, publishers can get started with Marcellus for as low as 25 Dollars per month.
For a free, 30-day evaluation, please visit http://marcellus.tv/start and start publishing videos in less than five minutes.

ABOUT MARCELLUS

Marcellus is a video platform for small and mid-sized businesses to deliver high quality video experiences from their own web sites. The Marcellus team comprises of former researchers from the University of California at Berkeley, and has over a decade of experience with online video technology and social media.
The company was founded in August, 2007 and has offices in North America and India.

PDF: http://cdn.marcellus.tv/press/2010/january/jagran_marcellus.pdf

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