Just two days back, Idea revealed its plan of launching a cohort of dedicated digital apps in the coming week. Standing true to its words, the telecom provider has now released ‘Digital Idea’, a digital services platform to provide digital content to its users at a launch event in Mumbai.
The app suite is a set of three apps including one for music, one for movies and the last one dedicated for gaming. The newly entrant Jio in the telecom industry forced the company to transit from just a telecom provider to a digital solutions company.
Idea has titled the three apps namely- Idea Music Lounge, Idea Movie Club, and Idea Game Spark.
The first one among the lineup is the Idea Music app. It will be available on both iOS as well as the Android platform. The music platform currently boasts of over two million songs in 14 Indian regional languages. The content of this app is a by-product of the partnership of Idea cellular with Hungama Digital, a content creation platform. Idea expects a 10-fold growth within a short span of time, courtesy of its just launched music app.
Apart from preset features expected from a music app, the app offers features such as Data saver mode, queuing mode, HD streaming, Sing along mode, DJ effect along with a wake up with music feature that enables a user to set up a particular song as a morning alarm tune.
The Idea Movie Club app will deliver about 4,000 movies in 11 different languages besides streaming over 90 live TV channels. The telecom giant has partnered with Eros Now for the offered movies whereas for theLive TV, it has joined hands with Ditto TV. The platform will further serve over 100 videos for kids and offer features such as voice search, pause and resume among others.
The third among the ‘Digital Idea’ app suite is Idea Game Spark. This app is specifically designed to provide a rich gaming experience to its customers providing over 1,500 games in different genres. Moreover, the company is inviting game developers for development for further content.
Apart from it, Mumbai-based telecom company has parterned with Paytm for technology integration and collecting revenues generated through the mentioned apps. Idea will initially deliver free content for 90 days after downloading the apps. On the conclusion of the free period, the company has detailed the following prices- the Idea Movie Club and Idea Music Lounge apps will charge Rs 49 per month while the gaming platform, Idea Game Spark will be available for Rs 29 per month.
Though the apps will be available for free for 90 days, the company will charge the users for data download relative to the app from the existing data pack of the user. Speaking of its counterpart Jio, the company presently offers unlimited free data to its users until the end of March 2017.
Besides Jio and Idea, other dominant players in the digital content market include Airtel which offers its Airtel Movies, an on-demand movie streaming app, and Wynk music with over 2.5 million songs. Vodafone also holds its own Vodafone Play TV app providing access to over 150 live TV channels in eight regional languages.
Sunil Tolani, National Head for Digital, Idea, commented on the launch saying,
Digital Entertainment services is just the beginning. Idea will, in the immediate future, also expand its digital offerings into digital communication, digital payments, cloud & storage, digital information and many more. Best in class digital Consumer Experience, Collaboration with Indian & Global Partners, developer eco-system and Co-Existence rather than competition with the Physical, will be the key building blocks.
To beat the tough competition led by Jio, the company further plans expand its 4G services to 9 more circles by March 2017 reaching to about 90% of the nation.
