Gaurav Bista came to Nepal with his Mechanical engineering degree from India. However, his passion in media drew him to work on uplifting and promoting Nepali media productions through digital platform. He initiated WatchNep.com in 2016 streaming videos of Nepali artists by giving them better monetary benefits.
The story behind initiation
The idea came as Guarav Bista, founder of WatchNep was pursuing his degree in Mechanical Engineering in India. “We used to search Nepali songs on Youtube to sing along and dance for fun. But, Youtube would feed us with other contents rather than Nepali songs and that was embarrassing. We realized that this was not only our problem. This problem hit the Nepali diaspora too. So, this idea of a portal for Nepali contents created by Nepali people struck us”, said Mr. Bista.
In the start, they spent some time researching on how to feature only the best Nepali content. The founder, Gaurav Bista shares, “It wasn’t easy as planned but we managed to keep the site online for six months before studies and other stuffs took over. We wanted to keep it going but failed in doing so until our graduation. After I completed with my Engineering, I came back to Nepal and decided to start it all over again.”
The second inning began with more focus, knowledge, details and a goal to attain. Upon his return to the country, he started working to make the web-portal more functional and found enough content to host. For that, he started reaching out to artists to convince them about the schemes and benefits from working with WatchNep. Now, there are 200+ creations from 30+ artists.
Inspiration
His passion for media was always there since childhood and was passionate about the audio-visual means of communication. “As a little boy, I used to capture photos and videos and narrate things on the screen. This love for storytelling has always lived inside me and continues to do so to this day,” shares Mr. Bista with a smile over his face as he recalls those moments. “That’s what I would call real inspiration while the incident acted only to trigger my love for the media and the need to act in the same direction”, he said.
About WatchNep
Established in 2016, WatchNep.com is a complete Nepali entertainment portal working to promote and produce Nepali media to take Nepali entertainment to all Nepali homes, in the country and abroad. It is hosting around 200 + creations from 30+ Nepali artists and the number is increasing consistently. The idea is to bring together curated Nepali productions of media contents including music, movies, and documentaries among others.
Explaining how artists can benefit from collaboration with WatchNep.com, Mr. Bista says that they will have the privilege of having their own profile which is maintained by WatchNep. In addition, they will also receive monetary benefit better than what is offered by other sites including Facebook and Youtube.
Challenges
As an optimist, Mr. Bista sees more opportunities than the challenges but if he were to put some into words it would be slow pace of work from their partners. To give an example, he says the programmers they have hired are taking a little more time to complete the design of revamped version of the website and the app for the same. “This hampers our calendar and delays plans to accomplish the goals we have set. Apart from that, it is not always easy to convince artists to collaborate with them as they are not used to offers like this in the Nepali market.” shares Mr. Bista.
Future Plans
According to Bista, WatchNep will also feature original contents from themselves in the future. Currently, 30 artists are featured on their site.
WatchNep is coming up with a new version of its website that is under development. “We are coming up with an updated version of the website with more content and some new features that includes a profile for every individual artist we collaborate with”, he said. The website will feature individual profiles of the contributing artists with information.
He also shared that WatchNep plans to help artists in the physical world as well through various empowerment workshops and sessions thereby providing opportunity to perform in concerts. “We want to see Nepali audience enjoy good stuffs and the artists being capable of creating them. So, we will do everything that needs to be done for the idea to come into practice”, shares Bista enthusiastically.
They have been conducting different workshops for upcoming artists to help them create quality content for instance the upcoming song writing workshop.
Message to the youth
He urges Nepali audience to love Nepali products through Nepali mediums as there are really passionate people working their hearts out to make good music, movies and other modes of entertainment. “If people can feel appreciated for the work they do, they can do their best and the audience will never run out of good dose of an entertainment package”, he says in conclusion.
By: Avaya Devkota
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