iWorld
Vi ties up with ‘Hungama Music’ to offer premium music streaming service
Mumbai: Strengthening its OTT-based digital content offerings, the telecom major Vodafone Idea on Monday launched its music offering on the Vi App in association with Hungama Music.
Vi’s music offering with Hungama was unveiled by the musician and composer duo – Salim Sulaiman, who also performed at the launch event. Under the partnership, Vi will offer a six months premium subscription of Hungama Music at no extra cost to all its post-paid and prepaid customers. As part of the offering, customers will be able to listen to ad-free music in as many as 20 languages across genres from Hungama’s library of songs, Bollywood news, and podcasts. Vi customers can also attend 52 Live Digital Concerts on the Vi App, said the teleco major.
Vi CMO Avneesh Khosla said, “Vi strives constantly to enrich the lives of its consumers through its partnerships with brands that have experience and expertise in the field of entertainment, education, health and financial services. Vi is committed to work with partners across varied domains to provide unique and compelling digital offerings for its consumers with varied needs and preferences. In the near future we will continue to see a lot newer initiatives being launched as this agenda gains scale and momentum.”
Khosla further added that the launch will fulfill the customers’ need for a comprehensive music streaming service. “Our association with Hungama will allow Vi users to get access to a rich repository of diverse music, across genres and in their preferred language,” he said.
Hungama Media founder Neeraj Roy said, “Our association with Vi has seen us introduce a first-of-its-kind Pay Per View service model in India’s exploding Premium Video On Demand (PVOD) market, earlier this year. The partnership aligns with Hungama’s aim to explore and develop innovative ways to entertain and engage audiences across the world. Our repertoire is consistently expanding to include a diverse, and rich line-up of multi-genre, multi-lingual content across audio, video, and gaming.”
iWorld
Airtel crosses 650 million customers to cement its place as world’s second largest telco
The Indian telecoms giant, now spanning 15 countries, is chasing the top spot with satellites, smartphones and mobile money
NEW DELHI: Numbers like these do not come around often. Bharti Airtel has crossed 650 million customers, making it the world’s second largest telecom operator by mobile customer base, according to GSMA Intelligence. Only one rival sits ahead of it. The gap, Airtel intends to close.
Gopal Vittal, executive vice chairman of Bharti Airtel, was characteristically measured. “Achieving the milestone of 650 million customers to be the second largest operator globally is a great responsibility for us to serve our customers better every day,” he said. “Every customer interaction is an opportunity to earn trust and deliver value.”
The scale of the operation is striking. In India, Airtel serves over 368 million mobile customers and was the first operator to launch 5G Plus services. It now reaches over 13 million homes with high-speed internet and a further 15 million households through its Digital TV offering. Its enterprise arm, Airtel Business, runs mission-critical infrastructure across cybersecurity, cloud, IoT and SD-WAN, underpinned by over 400,000 route kilometres of subsea fibre and a string of green data centres. The company has also announced a push into non-banking financial services, using its data insights to offer personalised credit products through the Airtel app.
Africa tells an equally ambitious story. Airtel Africa serves over 179 million customers across 14 countries, with Airtel Money, its mobile financial platform, counting over 52 million users. In a continent where traditional banking remains out of reach for millions, Airtel Money is not a product. It is infrastructure.
Beyond terrestrial networks, Airtel is reaching upward. Partnerships with Eutelsat OneWeb and SpaceX give it access to a constellation of low earth orbit satellites, pushing high-speed, low-latency broadband to remote maritime, aviation and rural areas that cables will never reach.
Airtel’s networks now cover over two billion people across 15 countries. The company that began as an Indian mobile operator has become something rather larger. At 650 million customers and climbing, it is not finished yet.
