For nearly three years now, JioTV has been the go-to mobile app for watching Live TV channels on a smartphone. Reliance Jio subscribers have been enjoying the service at no extra cost. As per the latest update, JioTV is now providing a total of 679 Live TV channels, beating the likes of Airtel Xstream and Vodafone Play comfortably. For the unaware, JioTV is Reliance Jio' standalone app for watching Live TV channels and the count has now reached 679. Competitors of Reliance JioTV are not even providing more than 400 Live TV channels, so it's an excellent achievement for Jio to lead them by almost two-fold. Airtel Xstream app has 367 Live TV channels right now, followed by Vodafone Play with around 350 channels on offer.
JioTV Live TV Channel Count Continues to Rise
Reliance Jio always focussed on providing better content to its users, be it from JioTV or JioCinema app. The JioCinema app recently got integrated with SunNXT content, and now, we can see the JioTV app offering a whopping 679 Live TV channels to the users at no extra cost. Talking more about the channels, Reliance Jio has divided the overall count into 13 categories.
JioTV app offers channels in various categories like Business News (7), Devotional (66), Educational (50), Entertainment (125), Infotainment (38), Jio Darshan (8), Kids (32), Lifestyle (17), Movies (62), Music (45), News (202), Shopping (1) and Sports (26). As you can see, Reliance Jio has its own category called 'Jio Darshan' which offers devotional channels to watch the ongoings in popular temples across the country.
Besides the standard Live TV channels, the Mukesh Ambani-led telco has its own channels like Jio Bollywood Premium HD, Jio Cricket 1 HD, Jio Cricket 2 HD, Jio Cricket 3 HD, Jio Cricket 4 HD, Jio Cricket English HD, JioCinema, JioCinema Action, JioCinema Comedy, Jio Telugu Hits HD and so on. Basically, Reliance Jio is launching its own channel across even genre like sports, movies, news, esports and so on.
On the flip side, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea are not providing their own channels in the respective apps, which is not allowing them to increase the overall channel count. Reliance Jio has more than 30 Live TV channels of Jio branding, whereas the other two telcos have zero right now. These Jio branded Live TV channels provide other content from various sources and they will be different from other channels available on JioTV app.
JioTV App Features: PiP Mode, Catch-Up TV and More
JioTV app is leading the content segment with ease, but what about the features? Well, in this aspect, we believe Airtel Xstream and Vodafone Play apps offer way better user interface, unlike JioTV which features a cluttered UI. Browsing between channels is a pain on JioTV app, but there's the search function which works flawlessly. JioTV app has various tabs like Featured to find all the popular & trending shows currently, News tab which curates all the top stories of the day, Sports tab with all the live/highlights of recent matches and so on.
Then there's the seven-day catch-up TV option which allows users to watch a programme from the last week. While JioTV does not let users take screenshots, it has a record function helping the viewers to record their favourite show and watch it at a later date. Very recently, the app received two features- Dark Mode and Picture-in-Picture (PiP) mode, and they both are pretty useful to the users.
