After specifications war, it will be the battle of content-based ecosystems. LeEco has teamed up with Hungama, the first Indian company to bag investment from Xiaomi.
Along with the Le 1s (Eco) smartphone launch, LeEco is finally expanding its content portfolio in India as it just announced a subscription based service which includes content from Yupp TV, Eros Now and Hungama Music. LeEco will be offering access to over 3.5 million music tracks across 25 Indian languages. The LeEco Music service based on Hungama will be available in the third quarter of this year and the company hopes users would pay it a monthly or annual subscription fee for content streaming services.
The integration seems to be similar to Gaana’s with Yu Yutopia, and now future Micromax smartphones. While the tie up is a big news for LeEco users in India, it’s more interesting to note that Xiaomi had led the $25 million investment round in Hungama earlier this year.
LeEco and Xiaomi are rivals and that Xiaomi’s investment in Hungama was believed to lead to a deeper integration of the music streaming service into its own Mi Ecosystem. It may be recalled that the Xiaomi investment in Hungama was also linked with the company’s plans to launch smart TVs wherein content is most likely to play a key role.
“We have carefully selected Hungama because of what they are doing in terms of aggregating large amounts of content and delivering an amazing user experience,” Xiaomi’s Hugo Barra had said.
It remains to be seen how Hungama’s tie up with rivals, especially LeEco, will adversely impact Xiaomi’s plans to expand its content offerings in the near future. Right now it clearly jeopardizes Xiaomi’s plans to make Hungama a USP of its future content offerings.
With LeMusic, enjoy over 2.5 billion songs on your #SuperPhones @Hungama_com pic.twitter.com/65xyGlLdCw
— LeEco India (@LeEcoIndia) May 3, 2016
It also raises a question about the benefit Xiaomi would have from its investment, since Hungama has been teaming up with its rivals. It’s not the first time Hungama has a tie up with a Xiaomi-competitor. In March this year, OnePlus announced unlimited movie streaming and music downloads from Hungama worth Rs. 3,599 free for 90 days.
We have reached out to Xiaomi to find out more about its plans with Hungama, and whether it will have an exclusive tie up with content providers in the near future.
Source: bgr.in
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