Bharti Airtel said it has made its e-book application — available to anyone — free on a temporary basis to help those who are spending time at home as part of the Coronavirus lockdown. “Readers can now access thousands of top books and novels on Juggernaut Books (formerly known as Airtel Books) for FREE by […]
Hotstar, India’s largest premium streaming platform, said 15.6 million (1.6 cr) people used its video streaming app at the same time on June 16, when India played Pakistan in the ICC World Cup in England. In all, 10 cr people logged into the service some time during that day. This is a record for the […]
Bharti Airtel has made ring-back tones or caller tunes free for anyone with a monthly plan of Rs 129 or above. The service used to be charged at Rs 36 per month and lets users specify a song or sound-track of their choice for callers to hear, instead of the regular brr brr. The move […]
The number of smartphone users in India is expected to almost double by 2022 from 47 cr registered at the end of 2017, a joint study by ASSOCHAM and PwC said. Fueled by cheap data and the explosion of ‘over the top’ services, the total number of smartphones will hit 86 cr by 2022, which […]
Telecom operator Bharti Airtel updated its TV app by adding a new section for election coverage and incorporating content from the ‘Editor Ji’ platform founded by former NDTV CEO Vikram Chandra. Airtel TV app users will now have access to exclusive election news bulletins from the video news app, Editor Ji, which is funded by […]
The Delhi High Court today dismissed a petition by a lawyer’s organization, Justice For Rights, seeking censoring of online content such as Game of Thrones, Spartacus, Vikings and Sacred Games. The petition, filed late last year, claimed that such videos constituted “unregulated, uncertified, sexually explicit, vulgar, profane, and legally restricted content”. The lawyers wanted the […]
PhonePe, the payment app backed by Flipkart, announced that it has crossed the 1 mln merchants milestone and plans to add another five million this year. This is likely to help the company narrow the gap with market leader PayTM, which had an estimated 10 mln (1 cr) merchants in its network as of late […]
As Netflix inches closer to saturation point in its North American home market, it is desperately looking for growth abroad. India being the only billion plus market where it can operate with ease, it is no wonder that its push is aggressive here. However, as Netflix’s market share stagnates, does it risk meeting the same […]
Reliance Jio has pulled its enormously popular Jio Music app and replaced it with JioSaavn, a new app based largely on Saavn, a competitor that the company had acquired in March. Users who have enabled auto-updating of their apps will be upgraded to the new application automatically. With over 100 mln (10 cr) downloads, Jio […]
Dish TV, India’s largest direct-to-home satellite television service, said it will send out software upgrades to over 4 mln (40 lakh) of its users that will enable them to install apps to watch Internet content on their TV by December. “There are almost 4 million boxes that we have which we can convert into connected […]
Airtel and Netflix announced an expansion of their partnership in India through which the telecom operator will sell and promote Netflix content to its customers. Airtel TV, the video app from the operator, will have a dedicated row of Netflix content. It is not clear how much of the content will be made available on […]
Ravi Shankar Prasad, India’s minister for law and information technology, said the government has got ‘good response’ from WhatsApp for its proposal to install a monitoring mechanism on the platform. The government has been pushing WhatsApp to put up a monitoring mechanism that would send out alerts when messages on any one subject starts going […]
Assocham, one of India’s prominent associations of industries, has expressed concern at the government’s proposal to put in place a mechanism to block apps like Facebook, WhatsApp and Telegram. The government has, in a confidential letter sent to internet service providers, asked them to suggest ways in which such apps can be blocked at India’s […]
Telecom operators and the Unique Identification Authority of India have denied having anything to do with the ‘mysterious’ addition of the UIDAI’s former helpline to the contact lists of Android phone users in India. That leaves only three candidates — Google, which makes Android, handset makers and any of the popular apps that has been […]
Reliance Jio’s delays in ‘going pay’ with its content suite seems to be giving rivals like Bharti Airtel pause for thought as far as their content plans are concerned. Jio unveiled a large suite of content applications when it launched its telecom service two years ago, prompting rivals like Airtel and Idea Cellular to draw […]
WhatsApp, India’s largest communication platform used by an estimated 65% of the country’s online population, has come under scrutiny for providing a conduit to distribute ‘fake news’ after multiple cases of lynchings came to light. While the company has urged ‘society and companies’ to help tackle the menace, the messaging application has some more to […]
WhatsApp, the messaging application that is wildly popular in countries such as India, has introduced a client for PCs running Windows or Mac OS. This is the first time the company has gone beyond mobile applications. The messaging service, owned by Facebook, has almost completely replaced text messaging in India, the world’s second largest telecom […]
ALTBalaji, the biggest Indian provider of original online content, is signing up paid users at the rate of 25,000-30,000 per day, said Nachiket Pantvaidya, the CEO of Balaji Telefilms, the company behind the app. “We expect to have paid users of 10 mln by the end of the year,” Pantvaidya said in an interview with BTVI. […]
Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd said it has tied up with Israel-based Screenz to offer interactivity and ‘play along’ features for television programs in India. With the help of the offering, television channels can keep their viewers engaged on a realtime basis using smartphone apps. Jio has already deployed the concept for the quiz show Kaun […]
WhatsApp, the biggest interpersonal text-messaging platform in India, has started rolling out its ‘verified accounts’ feature with IndusInd Bank as one of its first customers. For now, verified accounts are limited to businesses, and will be used to assure customers that they are communicating with the official, and authorized, phone number of a business or […]
