— Photo: Special Arrangement

MOVIE ON HAND: Roamware's Media Call technology and Hungama Mobile's Bollywood content have combined to bring Indian movies to the mobile phone.

Bangalore: Honey, they've shrunk Bollywood! It now fits on the small screen of your mobile phone. The Mumbai-based entertainment aggregator, Hungama Mobile, and the U.S.-based, Indian-ingenuity-fuelled cellular solutions provider, Roamware, have joined hands to create technology and content that will soon see a string of Indian cinema-based offerings for third generation mobile phone owners.

These will include a series of 7-10 minute Hindi film capsules, called ``Dus Kahaniyan'' or Ten Stories, specially created by a team of distinguished directors, anchored by film maker Sanjay Gupta, that will simultaneously be released in Indian theatres, as a 100-minute feature film.

The first three of the mini movies are slated to have their global unveiling, at the world's biggest gathering of the mobile phone industry — the 3GSM World Congress which opens in Barcelona on Monday.

The Bollywood-on-mobile initiative complements the initiative of veteran Hollywood actor-director Robert Redford, who will also be on hand to announce a global short film for mobile project at the next edition of the Sundance Film Festival, which he inspired.

Both heads of Roamware and Hungama Mobile took time off to talk on the telephone to The Hindu on Saturday, soon after they landed in Barcelona to kickstart their initiative.

Bobby Srinivasan, California-based Chief Executive Officer of Roamware, explained that the technology that helped push the movie content to the mobile handset was ``Media Call'' — designed to enable phone users to seamlessly `talk, look, listen and share" a variety of multimedia content.

It was developed by Roamware's Indian engineers at its development centres in Mumbai and Gurgaon, near Delhi.

The company is also sponsoring the Sundance short film project and hopes that the Bollywood initiative with Hungama, will fill a void for the huge Indian diaspora worldwide.

Neeraj Roy, Managing Director and CEO of Hungama Mobile, explained that the company was already serving 70 international carriers in 30 countries with Bollywood-based news, video clips and entertainment.

``The move to create feature films specially for mobiles is the next logical step for us after cable and Internet,'' he explained.

``We believe that this has tremendous promise as a content delivery mechanism — and the availability of 3G networks has made this feasible and accessible for millions of users.''

Will mini movies on mobile be the ultimate `time pass' for India's young cell phone users? These two players seem to think so — and in a coincident move, Nokia has just announced a contest to create short videos for mobiles. An idea whose time has come? Looks like it!

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