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RJio to reinvent TV viewing in India

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V&D Bureau
New Update

Reliance is set to live up to its "disruptor" reputation once again. This time via its subsidiary Reliance Jio Infocomm (RJio), which became the first telecom operator in the country to get a pan India Unifed License in October 2013.

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Currently, the company is busy preparing for rollout of its high-speed, multi-media digital services spanning education, healthcare, entertainment, financial and cloud services among others. The first of these services over 4G is scheduled for market launch in September, this year.

RJio's integrated digital portfolio is likely to fast track the industry in delivering transformational solutions to India market. While the company is not yet willing to divulge details of the services that will hit the market first, video and cloud services will likely lead the pack in the area of entertainment, education and health.

Earlier in January, this year, the company showcased many of its solutions at the IIT Mumbai Techfest - demonstrating the speed at which these services will work on its 4G network, as a preview of things to come. If that was any indicator entertainment services will form a huge chunk of its service portfolio.

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Live TV and video-on-demand with high definition viewing experience across devices will drive the anytime, anywhere TV for RJio. Also, on demo was catch-up TV that eliminates the need to record favorite shows as the service allows you to view seven days of stored content for each of its over 100 channels, at your leisure.

The minute TV services are delivered over 4G and are made device independent, the business opportunities multiply manifold for the whole eco-system, and re-invent television viewing in the process. For Rjio, much is riding on its foray into the TV services market.

How market-ready is RJio?

Apart from Reliance Communications, RJio has finalized key agreements with other technology partners, service providers, infrastructure providers, application partners, device manufacturers and other strategic partners.

Most recently, the company executed a Master Services Agreement to use Viom Networks' pan India passive telecom infrastructure having a footprint of over 42,000 telecom towers. "This agreement is in line with our mission of a pan India launch spanning next-generation voice and data services and leveraging existing telecom infrastructure," said Sanjay Mashruwala, Managing Director, RJio in a statement after announcing the agreement in March 2014.

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In December 2013, R Jio had announced a comprehensive telecom infrastructure sharing arrangement with Bharti Airtel under which the companies agreed to share infrastructure created by both parties. This includes optic fibre network - inter and intra city, submarine cable networks, towers and Internet broadband services as well as other such opportunities identified in the future. The arrangement could, in future, be extended to roaming on 2G, 3G and 4G, and any other mutually benefiting areas relating to telecommunication.

As part of this arrangement, Bharti and RJio have already put in place an agreement under which Bharti has provided capacity on its i2i submarine cable to RJio. i2i is Bharti's submarine cable venture with SingTel linking India with Singapore network. It underwent a recent upgrade using Ciena's converged packet optical and network management solutions, in an effort to respond to a surge demand for high-bandwidth data services driven by enterprise applications and an increase in use of mobile bandwidth across the region.

RJio is also part of the "Bay Of Bengal Gateway" (BBG) Cable System, planned to provide connectivity between South East Asia, South Asia and the Middle East, and also to Europe, Africa and to the Far East Asia through interconnections with other existing and newly built cable systems landing in India, the Middle East and Far East Asia.

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Gamechanger device

The potential of all this, however, can only be realized when low cost compatible devices hit the market. And that is something that still needs to fall in place for RJio. Reportedly, RJio has been talking to Korean major Samsung and Chinese companies ZTE and Huawei to explore providing compatible handsets to be bundled with the service at affordable India-market price points. According to market analysts, the device likely to be priced at Rs 5,500 will change the way India interacts with digital content.

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The real driver for the data consumption explosion will be the speed though. During its trials RJio showcased broadband speed of 49 megabit per second, which is more than 12 times of the 3G mobile Internet speed, currently available to consumers. At a speed of 49 mbps, one can download a full movie, which is generally of 600 megabyte in size, in just about 2 minutes.

Get set go...

Today, RJio team has grown to over 3,000 from the 700 as reported last year, and this headcount it is said will cross 10,000 at the end of FY 2014-15.

The latest name to join RJio is Nikhil Rungta who has joined in the capacity of Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). He was the Chief Business Officer at Yebhi.com, and prior of that he was the Country Marketing Head for Google India and was responsible for managing the Google brands including Youtube, Android, Chrome and Google Plus. Now, the market will possibly hear some announcements from RJio in the coming months of the action beyond pilots in the market.

 

 

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