“Vi will offer six months premium subscription at no extra cost to all its postpaid and prepaid customers,” said the third largest telco and Hungama Music in a joint statement on Monday.
Earlier, Vi had partnered with Hungama for premium video on demand. The latest alliance will help telco compete with its rivals Reliance Jio Infocomm (Jio) and Bharti Airtel in its content offerings and music is one of the highest content grossers.
Jio and Airtel have JioSaavn and Wynk apps, respectively. Gaana, Spotify and Youtube Music are other leading music platforms in the market.
For the telco, getting customers is crucial to improve its average revenue per user (ARPU) -a key industry parameter.
The telco which lost 18.8 million users just in the last year, ended the September quarter with 253 million users. The loss-making telco is desperate to arrest and then reverse the trend of subscriber losses. It had 408 million at the time of merger between Vodafone India and Idea Cellular in August 2018.
As of the September end quarter, its ARPU was Rs 109 while that of Airtel and Jio was Rs 153 and Rs 143.6 respectively.
