Airtel vs Jio to play out next in health, education, regional content
NEWDELHI: Bharti Airtel Ltd has identified two new areas— healthcare and education— around which it plans to build content apart from sharpening focus on regional music and videos on its platform as it braces for a long battle with rival Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd.
Bharti expects the current round of battle will centre around content as cut-rate data tariffs have ceased to provide a meaningful competitive edge in the hyper-intensive telecom market.
While Reliance aims to focus on producing in-house web series and shows for Jio subscribers, Bharti Airtel is forging partnerships with content producers Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hotstar, Sony LIV and ZEE5, among others.
“We don’t believe in controlling the entire value chain end-to-end... There are a bunch of partnerships that we have got done which are exclusive to us... on the video side we want to stay away from producing content,” Sameer Batra, CEO, content and apps, Bharti Airtel, said in an interview.
With regional content doing well on its platform, Bharti Airtel plans to increase these offerings to users to boost data usage. The company aims to bank on its machine learning and data science capabilities to spot trends and customise its offerings.
“Customers are very different across areas. For example, you would think that Hindi music is popular in Delhi. We are finding that Bhojpuri and Haryanvi music is very big in Delhi,” he said.
The firm has already inked a couple of partnerships to enhance regional content. It has partnered with Kolkatabased Shree Venkatesh Films to bring a large catalogue of Bengali content on Airtel TV, apart from signing up Marathi folk singer and Indian Idol season one contestant Prajakta Shukre to release six music tracks for Airtel’s music app Wynk Music. “We are also talking to a team which has a huge catalogue of Nepali films, apart from planning a couple of partnerships for content to cater to the youth. We are also on the verge of closing a deal with global music label Orchard to add to our South Korean pop music category,” Batra said. Driving data usage through content is key for Bharti Airtel. In April-June, Jio reported 10.6 GB average data consumption per user per month while for Bharti Airtel this was 7.8 GB.
“Apart from music and video, we will get into one or two more key areas of interest and build the portfolio in a manner that we think is consistent with our ability to get scale and more importantly lock customers down. Healthcare and education are two areas which we are studying at the moment quite deeply,” Batra said.