iWorld
ABS Group ties up with BSNL for on-demand services
MUMBAI: In a bid to expand its services in a highly competitive environment, the Atul Saraf led ABS Group has lined up a spree of developments. The company, which is all set to launch its MPEG 4 headend, is now strengthening its value added services (VAS) offering.
ABS has entered into an agreement with telecom giant BSNL. As part of this, BSNL’s 10 million broadband subscribers can access the VAS and movies-on-demand services of ABS through its portal www.absplay.in.
“We are working on setting up the servers in the BSNL premise for our value added services,” ABS CMD Atul B Saraf tells Indiantelevision.com.
The portal will go live in August, 2015 after which BSNL broadband subscribers can access the library that contains more than 1000 movies, 60,000 songs and videos and approximately 70-80 web channels. “It is a subscription based model. There will be a revenue share between BSNL and us,” informs Saraf.
The content will range from Bollywood, Hollywood, Tollywood, regional, sports, devotional, comedy, horror, action to music, short length videos and full length videos. While refraining to divulge the pricing of the content, Saraf says, “It will be in a very cost effective manner.”
Close to 25 per cent of the catalogue has been purchased by ABS, while 75 per cent of the content will be on revenue sharing basis with content creators. “We have bought content from both national and international content providers. We will have a revenue share with them,” he informs.
“We saw a gap in the VAS space and so tried to tap into it. This is part of our new revenue generating launches,” says Saraf.
iWorld
WhatsApp may soon let users to pick who sees their status updates
The messaging giant is borrowing a page from Instagram’s playbook as it pushes to give users finer control over their social circles.
CALIFORNIA: WhatsApp is quietly working on a feature that could make its Status function considerably smarter and considerably more private.
According to reports from beta tracking platforms, the app is testing a tool called Status lists, which would allow users to create named groups such as close friends, family and colleagues, and control precisely which group sees each update. It is a meaningful step up from the platform’s current blunt instruments, which offer only three options: share with all contacts, exclude specific people, or manually select individuals each time.
The new feature draws an obvious comparison with Instagram’s Close Friends function, and the resemblance is unlikely to be accidental. Both platforms sit within Meta’s family, and the company has been nudging them toward a common logic of audience segmentation for some time.
The move also fits neatly into WhatsApp’s broader privacy push. The platform has been rolling out enhanced chat protections and is exploring the introduction of usernames, which would allow users to connect without exchanging phone numbers. Status lists extend that philosophy from messaging into broadcasting.
Meanwhile, Status itself has been evolving well beyond its origins as a simple photo-and-text slideshow. The feature now supports music stickers, collages, longer videos and interactive elements, pushing it closer to the social-media-style story format pioneered by Snapchat and refined by Instagram. In that context, finer audience controls are not merely a privacy feature. They are a precondition for people sharing more.
The feature remains in development and has not been confirmed for release. WhatsApp routinely tests tools that are later modified or quietly shelved. But the direction of travel is clear: the app wants Status to be a destination, not an afterthought. Letting users decide exactly who is in the audience is how it gets there.
