Airtel Books has a subscription service priced at Rs 129 for six months and Rs 199 for 12 months
As part of its focus towards content, Bharti Airtel has launched Airtel Books, which will allow mobile users to access over 70,000 e-books on their smartphones.
The over the top (OTT) platform Airtel Books will be available to both Airtel and non-Airtel customers in iOS and Android and will initially offer over 70,000 titles from leading Indian and international authors.
With this, Airtel has further diversified its fast-growing digital content portfolio to add to its popular offerings like Wynk Music and Airtel TV. Airtel Books plans to rapidly expand its e-books collection by partnering with leading publishers as well as leveraging its strategic partnership with Juggernaut Books, the company said in a statement on Wednesday.
According to a recent report, the OTT industry in India is expected to reach a size of $5 billion by 2023. Rural areas will play a bigger role in OTT consumption and said about 48% of India's internet users (around 650 million by 2023) are expected to be from rural areas. "With increasing mobile penetration in tier 3, tier 4 and rural areas, there will be many consumers who will be OTT first, who have never consumed content on TV," the report added.
All Airtel Books users will get a complimentary 30-day trial to experience the app and can access free titles from the Readers Club. Airtel smartphone customers will also enjoy a one-time special benefit of being able to access any five paid titles from the Readers Club, which has a collection of over 5000 e-books.
Airtel Books has a subscription service called Reader's Club, which has been priced at Rs 129 for six months and Rs 199 for 12 months. Customers can also buy books on a per book basis with best-in-class offers.
"Airtel Books is another major milestone in our journey towards building a world-class digital content portfolio. E-books are a fast-growing segment along with music and video, thanks to large screen smartphones becoming the cornerstone of the digital lifestyle. As we have demonstrated with Wynk Music and Airtel TV, our aim is to use deep customer science to curate great reading content for our users, "Sameer Batra, CEO – content & apps, Bharti Airtel said.
Alongside famous authors, Airtel Books will also offer a large catalogue of stories from as short as five pages across a range of genres - crime, love, sex and romance, business, history and politics, fitness, diet, spirituality and classics.
According to experts, content will be the next battleground for telecom players as data is the only silver lining in the otherwise stressed telecom sector. Over the top players - Netflix, Amazon Prime, Zee5, Hotstar, ALT Balaji have been critical to the data growth in 4G mobile services.
Telecom players including Airtel, Reliance Jio, Vodafone Idea already have their own application for streaming movies, TV shows, including regional content. Going forward, the key will be content offerings as tariffs have more or less become same across the telecom players. The differentiator will be various content offerings through OTT (over the top) applications.
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- Airtel Books has a subscription service priced at Rs 129 for six months
- OTT industry in is expected to reach a size of $5 bn by 2023
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