Teewe’s office in Bangalore is anything but posh. Young staff mill about the room. Engineers alternate stares between phone and TV screen as they test an app. Boxes pile in one corner, waiting to be shipped out. It’s a busy day at the startup.
Sai Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of Teewe, enters in a polo tee and shorts. He invites me into a room and away from the buzz. Grabbing a marker pen, he sketches out the company’s journey and vision, quite literally, on the boardroom table.
“We originally wanted to start a games studio,” says Sai, the “we” including Teewe co-founder Shubh Malhotra.
But halfway through, Sai noticed how the television set hasn’t changed through the years. Yes, displays were getting better, but not the way people interacted with it. The seed was sown for Teewe, an HDMI stick like the Google Chromecast that can make dumb TVs smart.
For now, there isn’t much separating the much-lauded Chromecast from the Teewe. Low price of under US0? Check. Stream videos from your phone or laptop to the TV? Check.
So is Teewe a copycat? Not exactly.
“Our vision and direction is very different from the Chromecast,” he says, adding that products often start similar but diverge. And that’s exactly what he hopes to do after closing a US.7 million funding round from Sequoia Capital and India Quotient in early 2015.
The Teewe costs INR 2,399 (US), same as the first-generation Chromecast in India. That’s about the price of a set-top box, and Teewe wants to enter the home of every family by replacing the set-top box with a tiny stick containing the same features and more (it could become a game console, for example). Even better, it would use something families already own as the remote controller: the smartphone. That’s audacious.
The price makes this affordable to people in India, where the median monthly wage is US5. The same story applies in Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, where wages are rising but relatively low.
“A guy’s not gonna have a separate Xbox, a guy’s not gonna have a separate set-top box, a guy’s not gonna have a separate Roku. Most probably he will want a good experience brought together in a single device,” Sai says with a passionate flourish.
Something for the whole family
Sai Srinivas, CEO and co-founder of Teewe
Sai will unveil a series of features to set Teewe apart. True to its gaming focus, Teewe will soon allow users to play mobile games on their TV screens – lag-free. Here’s how: instead of beaming the entire game from the smartphone, which clogs the wifi network, the game will be stored in the Teewe dongle, which is plugged into the TV.
The Teewe smartphone app acts as the controller, which sends simple commands to the dongle. Because the file size of these commands are minuscule, gamers can react instantly to what’s happening on screen, enhancing their experience.
There’s more. It’ll debut a new feature on its desktop app for users to paste a torrent link and stream content that way – sort of like Popcorn Time but without the legal wrangles.
“We don’t want to be seen as promoting piracy,” Sai says. “But at the same time, we want our consumers to have a choice. Let them have the choice […] I’m not judging or questioning them. Like if you buy a DVD player, and if you play a pirated DVD, it’s your fault, not the DVD player’s fault.”
Now, here comes the most significant update: Teewe will soon enable users to stream live Cricket matches, as well as Hindi movies and TV shows. It can do this without an API, unlike Chromecast.
It uses a clever little hack – an in-app browser that loads content from online streaming sites like Hotstar. Users simply select a show on the Teewe app, and it’ll load the webpage and transmit the content on-screen, complete with sound.
Sai breaks down his gameplan. While Teewe has not talked to Hotstar yet, it’s definitely on the roadmap.
He plans to pitch Teewe as a friend to these sites. Video ads that appear before the actual show won’t be blocked by the startup. This makes advertising a big part of Teewe’s future: it’ll offer brands the ability to target audiences on its platform, and offer streaming sites a larger audience. That’s provided it can reach a massive scale, of course.
The decision to go API-less suits India and Asia. Since Netflix is a tech company first and foremost, it eagerly integrated Chromecast into its site. “It wouldn’t happen if Netflix is owned by the Warner Brothers,” Sai argues, and that’s how Asia’s media landscape is like.
Hard to build a hardware startup in India
Teewe is still early in its lofty game. It’s shipping only about 5,000 units a month, but hopes to ramp up to 12,000 by January 2016 purely through online sales on popular ecommerce sites.
When it first started in December 2013, Sai could not anticipate how painful it was to do a hardware startup in India. Building a prototype alone was arduous.
While a Teewe device needed 120 components, finding them in India was tough. In Shenzhen on the other hand, you can buy these individual parts in one shop. You can find people with the expertise to piece these components together.
“The one thing that we really wanted to do, and were driven by, is that we wanted to really make the product and ship it. And we didn’t want to stop before we do that,” he says.
“We were very happy if we ship the product and the market says, ‘this startup is not great.’ That’s an answer we’re fine with. But we didn’t want to say we didn’t ship and were lost midway through that. It’s like saying that you went all the way to Nepal and didn’t climb Mount Everest.”
The company in the end manufactured in Shenzhen. It’s trying to distribute its device to Indonesia, and is setting up an office in Singapore.
Things have gotten easier for Teewe these days. He sketches out a curve on the table. The early days of a hardware startup are a steep cliff. For Teewe, it was a one-and-a-half year climb. But things leveled off after that.
“Because you know all the people, you know the industry. If you’re familiar with the entire Shenzhen ecosystem, you know who to talk to, you know what you need to get done. You know that when something goes wrong, this is what you need to do,” he says.
Hiring? Not a problem
While Sai laments how difficult it was to build hardware, one area he claims was easy is getting the best people to join him – something many startups cite as their number one challenge.
“When you’re doing something very hard, the best engineers want to work with you, because the best engineers want to work on the hardest problems. Actually a lot of our people left amazing jobs left to join us,” he says.
Take for example Soumya Misra, who left a cushy gig at Intel to become Teewe’s lead hardware engineer. Or consider Nishtha Pangle, the startup’s vice president of design, who was the principal experience designer at Zynga.
Teewe gives people a chance to craft hardware and software from scratch, says Sai. Try getting Flipkart to match that.
Offering equity is another way to attract talent, says Sai. When negotiating pay, he would ask people how much they think their market value is. If they believe they can earn US,000 a year with another company, Sai would offer US,000 and let them decide how to split that into cash and equity.
“You are joining the startup primarily because you want to be part of the upside. What’s the point of you taking 4 to 5 lakhs (1 lakh is 100,000) more from me in a year, rather than take equity? Because if I make it big, these 4 to 5 lakhs really doesn’t make a difference.”
Most founders in India aren’t very good at convincing employees to take less salary to partake in the upside of the startup, he adds.
Sai, on the other hand, seemed to have nailed his pitch.
Update on Oct 24, 4.30pm: The price of the Chromecast has been corrected. The article also erroneously mentioned that Chromecast does not have a mobile app.
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This post Teewe may do what Chromecast can’t: enter the living room of every home in India appeared first on Tech in Asia.
Teewe may do what Chromecast can’t: enter the living room of every home in India
Source: TechinAsia