Bharti Airtel launched Wynk Tube on Tuesday, an extension of Airtel’s OTT music app Wynk Music, to cater to the needs of non-urban people. Wynk Tube is working on providing content from languages other than Hindu and English, which is the norm with most music apps. Punjabi, Bhojpuri, Tamil, Kannada and Marathi a are few of the 12 vernacular languages Airtel is focussing on.
Airtel has had a successful run so far with Wynk Music and are hoping to see similar results with Wynk Tube as well. Wynk Tube too works on similar lines like YouTube Music, which allows users to switch from the audio to video of the same song in one touch. The app has been currently launched for just Android users but further improvements would be done for other OSs as well. With the integration of machine learning algorithm, the users would be subject to a personalised experience. The best part of Wynk Tube is that it is working on a system that would allow users to create their own content for the app, making it different from other similar apps.
Just like Wynk Music, there are no charges for Airtel users to use Wynk Tube as well. However, other users would have to pay a subscription fee ₹99 per month to avail the benefits of the app.
If you dive into Airtel’s idea behind coming up with this platform you’ll see that it is to gain audience from rural India. With the 5 mb service, even low-end smartphones can run the app without any glitches. Moreover, with content from 12 different languages, they sure can capture a lot of the local market.
Who owns that market as of now? Reliance Jio. Yes, Airtel is taking the fight to Jio’s area of expertise, the rural India. Ever since Jio entered the market, all the top telecom companies have experienced a huge dent in their revenue. Jio played it smart by offering cheap data tariff to gain maximum numbers from rural area. To enable them to use their 4G sim, Jio even brought their own line of cheap 4G handsets, which the company claims to have sold well over 30 million handsets.
However, in terms of numbers, Airtel still leads the race with more number of rural users, with 157.5 million users of its 340.3 million users coming from rural India. Jio only has 111.8 million of its 297.2 million total users coming from rural areas. Anyway, one should not forget the fact that Jio has come up with such extraordinary numbers within a span of just over two and a half years. This is the exact reason why Airtel is being aggressive with its ideas to regain their market share in the Indian telecom industry through different mediums.
India’s music industry is capped at ₹1280 Crores with over 65% of it coming from digital platforms. Even the Swedish music platform Spotify too is making huge strides in making its mark in the Indian market. It would be interesting to see how this battle for Indian music market and telecom market plays out with all the giants rolling their dice at the same time.
