Bharti Airtel has finally stepped into the Live TV segment to combat its rivals such as JioTV and Idea Cellular. Airtel has added the Live TV feature to its Airtel TV application available for free on the Google Play Store. The Airtel TV app now offers TV Shows, Movies, Original Shows, and Live TV.
The Airtel Live TV feature is currently available only for Android. We checked on iOS too, but the app isn’t live just yet. Maybe Airtel will roll out the feature to iOS as well in coming days. Also, the channel count is very less as of now. To be precise, there are only 35 Live TV channels available in the app currently.
The 35 channels are split into four categories - News, Infotainment & Lifestyle, Movies, and Devotional. The News category has the most number of channels - 13, while the Infotainment & Lifestyle, Devotional categories have nine channels each. There are only four channels available in the Movies category.
Most of the available channels are in Hindi while some news channels are offered in other regional languages such as Malayalam and Tamil out of the 35 channels.
Under the Live TV section itself, Airtel has a new ‘CatchUp Shows’ department, which allows you to watch shows that were aired in the past week. The CatchUp Shows section has channels such as Discovery, Animal Planet, Music India, Discovery Science, Oscar Movies, etc. Besides this, there are not many new additions to the application. Currently, Airtel is offering content via five channels - EROS Now, HOOQ, Sony LIV, YouTube, and Dailymotion.
That said, Airtel started offering this service only recently, and more channels, as well as new features, will be added to the app over time.
Airtel TV app has a slew of features. And it is Chromecast ready, which means that you can cast videos on your TV screen from the app itself, you can create your favourite list of movies, and the application also allows you to continue watching your favourite Hindi and English movies from where you left the last time.
As mentioned earlier, the feature is currently available only for Android users. Apple’s iOS may soon get it, but there’s no word from Airtel just yet.
