NY-based desi portal has Bandra roots

NEW YORK: When Professor Sreenath Sreenivasan trotted out data during a talk at Columbia University in New York on the two-million-strong Indian-American community having the highest per capita income of all immigrant groups in the US, it gently washed over the audience. “But I heard him loud and clear and it started my brain ticking feverishly,” said former Goldman Sachs banker Marcus Stuart. 

Nine months have ticked by since the Professor’s lecture. The American entrepreneur has not been idle. He just launched a diversified media and entertainment company called Saffron Media with desi online content and sizzling Bollywood fare to target the wealthy South Asian community.

“The buying power of the 45 million Latinos in the US market is less than the Indian Americans by about $250 billion so who should you really pay attention to if you are a marketer?” added Stuart. “They are the highest educated, have the highest per capita income and they spend the most amount of time online — that is what got me excited. It is a marketer’s dream and I am a marketer,” said Stuart.

“My mentor at Goldman Sachs was Indian as well and I spent two months in Bandra working on a study to do with entertainment in India,” said Stuart who has joined forces with prominent Indian- Americans to launch the company. 

Saffron Media bagged seed stage investment of nearly a million dollars from angel investor Baldev Duggal. Tech entrepreneur Duggal is a legend in Manhattan’s photography circles for designing and building the Dip and Dunk processing machine which revolutionised film developing. 

Saffron has a strong management team with Duggal, Mumbai-based Jagmohan Mundhra’s daughter Smriti Mundhra, who has produced films like Bomb the System and Waterborne, and tech entrepreneur Michael Hussey. In 1999, Hussey invented one of the most enduring concepts in online culture, RateMyFace.com making him the father of online rating sites. Saffron has also entered into a merger agreement with Manu Kaushik, CEO of Divine Arts, Inc. to create the largest digital distribution platform for South Asian audio and video content. 

“We will create a physical CD and DVD distribution channel via partnerships in the UK, North America and India — effectively to launch a South Asian content distribution label,” said Kaushik who is now president and COO of Saffron Media. The merger creates a platform called Saffron Connect that is a cross between a social networking site like “MySpace” and “iTunes” for the South Asian market. It allows independent South Asian musicians, labels and video content owners to share and sell their content to users for a base cost of 25 cents a song. 

“The artist is free to price their own content. I think artists will price it between 50 to 99 cents. We have already got content from Bally Sagoo, Rishi Rich, Gunjan, Remo Fernandes, Karmacy and others. We have access to 1,100 artists and 100,000 tracks in our catalogue right now” said Kushik. Saffron Connect will be headquartered in Saffron Media’s corporate office in New York’s Flatiron district with a subsidiary office in Mumbai.

Saffron Media is operating in five segments. Saffron Online will focus on online and user-generated entertainment while Saffron Productions will focus on original television and film production. It is looking at the advertising & interactive marketing space and will act as a go-between for Hollywood and Bollywood while promoting South Asian actors, actresses, writers and film directors. It is also investing in mid-stage media companies.

Saffron Online which launched three India-centric portals in August plans to have six more portals and Bollywood entertainment sites up by the end of the year.  

“We also have a slate of eight TV shows right now,” said Stuart. “We are not going to produce everything by ourselves. We are in talks with Jagmohan Mundhra. Right now we are looking at carrying Sony, Zee, Fashion TV India, Punjabi channels and other television stations on Saffron TV so that the consumer can get feeds through the Internet on the television, computer, iPod or cellphone,” said Stuart. Saffron TV is scrambling to launch in October this year and is in the process of finalising content agreements and backbone partners to carry Indian entertainment from Mumbai.