Next Mediaworks launches digital offering for iPad, iPhone

Next Mediaworks Ltd has launched three products for the digital space. Next Mediaworks’ subsidiary, Radio One Ltd, runs radio stations in seven cities in India under the brand name 94.3 Radio One, which is a joint venture with BBC Worldwide.

The premium application, called ‘IndiaONE – The sounds of India’, offers a multitude of Indian sounds specially designed for the iPad and iPhone.

The application streams audio in high quality and consists of distinct channels that include Indian film music, a huge collection of various genres of non-film music like ghazals, religious, folk, Indipop, lounge, news in three languages, live stream radio in Hindi and Tamil, a Mood player that shuffles music and a 1,000-song karaoke channel (only on the iPad version) that includes tracks from the 70s to the latest film songs. As a special launch feature, the app also includes unplugged sessions of the best Indian musicians who have played exclusively at the Radio One studios and Bollywood stars who have presented their favourite songs in their own voices as played out in the Radio One stations across the country.

The ‘KaraokeONE” feature of IndiaONE is also available separately for iPad and iPhone and is one of the very few authorized karaoke offerings of Bollywood music in India. One can sing out the latest 1,000 Bollywood songs with synchronised lyrics and back up music and support vocals. Songs will be updated every 30-45 days at no extra cost for the period of subscription.

The development of the app has been done in partnership with www.2ergo.com, who are customer engagement experts in the digital space.

Research done by the company showed that most ‘free Indian music’ apps are not licensed and were very limited in their offering only to film music. Most people who have downloaded such apps hardly use them or have got bored of them as they don’t allow interaction of any sort. A lot of these apps have now been discontinued by the Apple store. This helped the company sense an opportunity in the ‘paid app’ area, but with a product that offers such a huge multitude of audio infotainment – both interactive and non-interactive.

The iPad full edition of IndiaONE (which includes karaoke) costs $1.99. The iPhone edition (without karaoke) costs $0.99 and only KaraokeONE for both iPad and iPhone costs $0.99. The launch price is a ‘special launch offer’ likely to go up post the holiday season.