Apple is partnering with Bharti Airtel of India to provide its music and video streaming services to the telecom company’s elite clients at no cost, providing the American behemoth access to thousands of users in the most populated country on earth.
TakeAway Points:
- Apple has partnered with Bharti Airtel of India to provide its music and video streaming services to the latter’s elite clients at no cost, providing the American behemoth access to thousands of users in the most populated country on earth.
- Apple Music will also be available for current premium users of Airtel’s Wynk music app, which will be shut down.
- Airtel will within days announce new tariff plans that will include free Apple TV+ offerings, said two other sources with direct knowledge of its plans.
Apple Partners With Bharti Airtel
With mostly English-language content, Apple TV+ is a small player in India’s $28 billion media and entertainment market, where its rivals include Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ Hotstar and billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s JioCinema.
The move comes as competition tightens in India and an $8.5 billion merger of the Indian media assets of Reliance and Walt Disney—which have a streaming service each—faces close scrutiny from antitrust regulators.
“Apple TV+ will come bundled with premium Airtel WiFi and Postpaid plans,” Airtel said in a statement on Tuesday, though the companies did not disclose a deal value for the partnership or information on costs.
Apple Music will also be available for current premium users of Airtel’s Wynk music app, which will be shut down. Its employees are being subsumed by the company, Airtel said.
Two sources familiar with the strategy said that for Apple, the deal is aimed at reaching out to a much bigger pool of consumers with its digital services, given Airtel is the country’s second-biggest telecom operator with 281 million subscribers.
Ambani’s Reliance Jio telecom service has 489 million users.
Apple TV+ position in India market
The Apple TV+ streaming service, known for its original series like Ted Lasso, The Morning Show, and Slow Horses, has so far differentiated itself in the streaming landscape with a focus on in-house content.
Most rival platforms in India and overseas offer users older movies and TV shows from other studios, as well as their own originals.
Airtel will within days announce new tariff plans that will include free Apple TV+ offerings, said two other sources with direct knowledge of its plans.
Currently, the Apple TV+ service retails at $9.99 per month in the U.S. and 99 Indian rupees ($1.18) per month in India, compared to Ambani’s JioCinema, which offers cricket content for free and has plans as cheap as 29 rupees a month. Netflix starts with a monthly tariff of 149 rupees.
Cricket is seen as a way to attract more customers to streaming platforms in India, and Disney lost millions of Indian users last year when it lost streaming rights to Ambani’s Reliance for streaming the world’s richest cricket tournament, the Indian Premier League.
Apple has 6% of India’s 690 million smartphone users, according to data from research firm Counterpoint. The remaining market is dominated by phones from Samsung and Xiaomi and is powered by Google’s Android operating system.
Apple Music is currently priced at 99 Indian rupees per month and has a library of 100 million songs.
