Over 400 train stations in India have free WiFi services, thanks to the venture between Indian Railways and Google. Indian Railways has grown by leaps and bounds in the past couple of years, and continues to follow the latest trends.
In a new report, Indian Railways is working on a way to bring entertainment content to your personal devices like laptops, tablets and smartphones. So while you are at the train station, or travelling in the train, you could access movies and TV shows on the go through the internet service.
The Ministry of Railways has invited bids for Content of Demand(CoD) and Rail Radio service. Companies like Airtel, Vodafone, Idea Cellular, Reliance Jio, Hotstar etc. can submit their interest to offer movies, tv shows and other similar entertainment services to passengers.
“According to a recent report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), through CoD on trains and at stations, the railways sees an overall infotainment market of around Rs 2,277 crore in three years’ time. The report says the interested parties might include content owners such as Eros Entertainment, Balaji Productions and Shemaroo Entertainment, and content aggregators like Radio Mirchi, Fever FM, Hungama and Bindass. ” Business Standard notes.
These CoD contracts will be offered for upto 10 years, as a part of the no fare revenue policy set by the Ministry of Railways. This will eventually not only improve customer satisfaction, but also the footfall of passengers every year.
How will this benefit the customers and content providers?
According to Indian Railways, the entertainment content on demand services will be provided on the personal devices of passengers in all trains and stations in a phased manner, which will be listed out in the Tender Document.
The licensee/service provider will be allowed to provide streaming Audio and video content services on all trains, however, radio service will not be allowed at stations. This makes sense because Radio is omnipresent, and sometimes gets a little messed up during the journey.
Indian Railways will hand over digital physical brochures to apprise the passengers about this technology, while also announce the same during the journey. Passengers can use the WiFi services and get CoD on their smartphones or laptops, which will make the journey less boring and more engaging.
The content providers will offer both paid and unpaid content, so customers can choose to view any type of content they want. This will also generate more views and revenue for these service providers. The service provider shall provide only ‘U’, ‘U/A’, ‘PG’ rated video content and ‘A’ rated content shall not be permitted.
In the end, the Government will also be taking some share of this from content providers, but everyone knows how train journeys can be boring, and this is an excellent initiative to generate more content and keep the passengers feeling more satisfied.
Source: Business Standard
