Twitter
Advertisement

LeEco launches membership plan with oodles of content streaming for Rs 490 a month

The LeEco Membership plan is the company's push to cement an entertainment platform for its harwdware devices in India.

Latest News
article-main
(L to R) LeEco COO Atul Jain, Jacqueline Fernandez, Sidharth Malhotra, and LeEco VP of content (APAC) William Lee.
FacebookTwitterWhatsappLinkedin

LeEco came out spitting fireworks at its mumbai event today. Aside from the launch of their latest budget “Superphone”, the company had another set of announcements to make with regards to their entire platform. The company announced a new LeEco Membership program. The plan consists of audio and video content, among other things, available across the company’s devices. Every device you buy from LeEco will now come bundled with the one year’s subscription to the new membership plan. So let’s dive and dissect just what you’re getting with the program.

First and foremost is LeEco’s already available Le Vidi app. The app is pre-installed, and only available for LeEco devices. It’s an aggregator app that gathers popular videos from the internet and allows the user to browse and watch at their leisure. The news is that LeEco has partnered with Eros Now, and therefore the latter’s collection of Indian movies will be available on the Le Vidi app. According to Kumar Abuja,president for business development at Eros Now, that’s more than 2,000 movies being shipped to Le Vidi, with that number expected to grow to over 3,000 in coming years.

Next is Live, another way to stream television content to your phone. Live is a way for LeEco smartphone users to livestream their favourite television channels. The company has tied up with YuppTV to bring in more than 100 channels to the service, including those in English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Gujarati, Punjabi, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Malayalam, Marathi and Oriya. What’s more, LeEco has its own content acquisition team and the company says that number will only get bigger in future. One other addition we can look forward to soon is Live Concerts, a channel that allows users to livestream concerts from the US, Switzerland, France, and China. And, just to show how seriously it’s taking the livestreaming service, the feature will be embedded into LeEco smartphone UI’s. Simply swipe right from the home screen and you have your channels ready to go.

Third is the new music service LeEco has launched, in partnership with Hungama.com. The service will offer Hungama’s entire audio and video catalog, completely ad-free, with support for 320Kbps lossless audio as well. That’s over 3.5 million songs in 22 Indian languages, all included in the price of the LeEco membership, with offline play included as well, so you don’t need to worry about your data plan draining.

And last of all is LeEco’s new cloud storage offering, LeEco Drive. The company is providing its LeEco members with 5TB of cloud storage, that you can use to store data or backup your phone.



LeEco is making a hard push to set up a well-rounded platform for its smartphones, as evidenced by comments from LeEco COO Atul Jain. “LeEco believes the age of profit from hardware is now officially over. We're consciously selling our phones below the manufacturing price,” he said at the event. “We believe our fans should only pay true value. Now it's time to up the game."

The company estimates the value of its membership plan to be about Rs 32,000. The price they’re offering it to customers at? Just Rs 490 a month or Rs 4,900 a year. Customers that buy a new LeEco device from now on will receive a one-year subscription to the membership plan bundled in. The kicker is that, if you buy a one-year subscription to the plan, you get the price of it knocked off a hardware piece you buy. So if you want to grab the new Le 1S (Eco), you’ll still be paying just Rs 10,899 for the phone as well as the membership. Unless of course, you buy it on day one. More on that here.

The Le Vidi update for Eros Now content will hit May 24, alongside the introduction of Le Live. Meanwhile Le Music and LeEco Drive will arrive in Q3. Users who already own an LeEco device will receive access to the services (pending a subscription) via an OTA update.

The LeEco services are currently restricted to the company’s own hardware, but top execs at the event hinted they were looking to spread to other Android devices soon. In addition, LeEco’s VP for content (Asia-Pacific) William Lee insisted that, once LeEco’s new range of smart TVs make their way to India, the LeEco membership services would be accessible on the, as well.

It’s hard to say, but we might have just experienced a serious game-changer in the making. It’s not the first time a Chinese company had made its way to India and upset the smartphone market, but LeEco looks to be playing a long game here, and playing it exceptionally well for now. With major partners for its content services, a wide platform reach, and affordable price tags for their hardware, we could be looking at the next Xiaomi/OnePlus/Huawei market dominator. 

Find your daily dose of news & explainers in your WhatsApp. Stay updated, Stay informed-  Follow DNA on WhatsApp.
Advertisement

Live tv

Advertisement
Advertisement