Why Airtel TV app is not worth the trouble or the free data
On September 5, 2016, when Reliance Jio entered the Indian telecom sector, it caused a never-before-seen shake-up in the industry. In the coming months, its predatory pricing forced telecom operators like Airtel to wake up from their deep slumber, and come up with new offers and services to counter Jio's increasing footprint the market.
More than a year on, it seems that churn is far from coming to a halt. With Reliance recently announcing the JioPhone that can also serve as a DTH device, and also directing more resources into its JioTV platform, Airtel is planning to improve the visibility of its forgotten Airtel TV application.
Under a recently announced offer, Airtel is providing 60GB of free high-speed mobile data – 10GB every month for 6 months – to its postpaid users, who download the Airtel TV application. The offer is similar to its previous offer announced for the app, under which postpaid users got 10GB of free data every month for three months.
Airtel TV app, which has been available on the Play Store for quite some time now, has amassed more than 10 million downloads. Apart from access to live TV on the go, the Airtel TV application brings with it interesting OTT content from Eros Now, HOOQ, Sony LIV, YouTube, and Dailymotion.
However, this OTT content does little to give Airtel an upper hand over rival offerings like JioTV, which is driving high data usage from users – a feat that Airtel is looking to replicate.
In the extremely competitive telecom market post-Jio's entry, data has emerged as the king. Push for greater data consumption and a drive towards more postpaid customers have been earmarked as tools to retain its top spot in the Indian telecom sector, and as such, the move to announce this free bundled data usage is a more about driving its postpaid customers than actually bringing more users to the mobile TV platform.
Thus it will be interesting to see if such offers actually drive up downloads for the Airtel TV application which, in all honesty, is very basic, and does not offer anything special over the existing competition to warrant space on your mobile phone.
If the telecom operator is actually serious about the Airtel TV app's future, it needs to add more content to its bouquet, while bringing in newer features and overall improvements to the application, which can be quite taxing on lower-end phones.
But, above all else, the telecom operator needs to improve the quality and connectivity of the network framework that the application uses to bring content on the go to users. Over the past couple of months, with usage spiking, data speeds have gone slow across the board.
Many Airtel users have also complained of network connectivity. As such, the need for Airtel right now is to fix issues on its network so that services like Live TV and OTT content can truly be enjoyed and taken up by users on its platform.