Late last year, India’s third largest telecom operator, Idea Cellular announced the Idea Movie Club application, the company’s first take on the content space. Now Idea has three digital content apps - Idea Movie Club, Idea Game Spark, and Idea Music Lounge. The Idea Music Club’s main target is to take on the rival telcos services - JioCinema and Airtel Movies.
However, the service was in beta stages for a major part of over three months, and now Idea is looking to add more features to the application to make it competitive enough. Unlike Jio, Idea is offering both the live TV service and movie streaming service in the Idea Movie club itself, whereas Jio has two separate apps for both of them - JioCinema and JioTv. Some people may like it, but most of them will hate it since having all the services in one standalone application will make the job lot easier.
Another interesting feature of Idea Movie Club is the dual screen for the users which allows them to browse and watch simultaneously. This feature is already present in Android Nougat powered tablets as ‘picture in picture’ with which users can pull down the player screen and can use other applications with ease. This feature is present in YouTube application as well, but you use other apps without exiting the YouTube application.
The Idea Movie Club app currently offers access to over 80 live TV channels in ten different languages like Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, Oriya, Marathi, Bengali, etc. It also allows you to record videos played from live TV channels, same as the catch-up feature rumoured to come with the Reliance Jio STB, but Idea is calling it ‘Trending TV.’
Another highlight feature is that the app shows trending stuff among both the live TV channels and movies, trailers based on what users are watching currently. The application also allows you to resume previous viewing sessions as it bookmarks where you left your video in the last session. It also saves data by playing the already watched sessions without buffering.
Lastly, there’s a download option with which you can download the latest movies, trailers, TV shows to watch them later. However, the only letdown with the application is that you can’t use it with any other network even there’s no premium subscription available as well.
There are some features in the Idea Movie Club, which are not present in either JioCinema or Airtel Movies. Idea is slowly catching up with the competition by adding features to the application, but they should increase the content presence, as well. Because JioTV has over 430 live TV channels more than any other operator in the segment.
