Now, tube in your car

Entertain yourself watching TV serials or surfing YouTube as you drive around town.

Ishwar Jha is a god-sent entrepreneur for the city’s commuting lot. Realising that people spend a lot of travelling on road, Jha along with his US-based partner Prakash Bhalerao, came up with avaniTV, a broadband-based platform that allows those on-the-go to watch the latest on television and even surf channels like YouTube.

“We thought about it last year in August. With Mumbai traffic, in-car entertainment is something one needs to explore. The idea was to create a home-like atmosphere in your car,” explains Jha.

A step ahead from the portable TV sets that have got antennas waving for more than a decade now, avaniTV comes with a sleek design, a small set top box and is sans the messy wires.

“The 3G connection is stable, unlike the antenna days when the images blurred as people moved and lost signal,” adds Jha. And though driving and surfing or watching TV is a recipe for disaster, Jha explains why it’s not such a distraction: “India has the largest number of chauffer driven cars in the world. So our target audience is people who sit back, rather than the drivers.”

With an initial installation cost of R 20,000, Jha’s product can transform the car’s headrest into an LCD screen to offer a small-screen experience on four wheels. And though it may leave a hole in your pockets, it aims to make your journey a little less harrowing.

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