Vodafone India has been aggressively competing with Reliance Jio since last month, and in the latest move, the UK-based telco announced that it would be offering free video streaming service on Vodafone Play for its subscribers till June 30, 2018. Alongside this announcement, Vodafone also stated that it has widened the bouquet of regional content to meet the demand. Vodafone Play now offers regional content with more than 5000 Bhojpuri, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi and Hindi dubbed Hollywood movies. The app also offers Live TV service with more than 300 channels on board.
This news from Vodafone comes right after Bharti Airtel's announcement of offering Airtel TV subscription free to every Airtel subscriber until June 30, 2018. As we highlighted at the start of this year, telecom players will fight for the crown the content space and are aggressively investing a lot of money for the same.
With Vodafone Play, the country' second largest telco is putting itself against Airtel TV, JioTV and Idea Movies and TV services. While JioTV has over 550 Live TV channels, Airtel and Vodafone are now offering more than 300 channels in regional languages.
And to achieve this, Vodafone has partnered with various content providers such as Yupp TV, ALT Balaji, HOOQ, and so on. Also, for Vodafone RED subscribers, the telco is offering free Netflix subscription with ranging from two months to one-year validity.
As stated, the Vodafone Play service will be now free for every Vodafone subscriber in India. To get started, a Vodafone subscriber needs to download the Vodafone Play app directly from Google Play Store or Apple App Store. Vodafone Play app is currently available to Vodafone subscribers on devices above running Android 4.1 and iOS 7 version and above.
Talking about the features of the Vodafone Play application, it comes catch up shows, dual view screen which is sort of picture-in-picture mode and so on.
To activate the free Vodafone Play subscription, customers need to download the latest version of the application and log in using their mobile number or email ID. Also, users can send an SMS as PLAY to 199 to get the service activated on their mobile number.