Medianama uses Google Labs’ SMS push service, which is text-based. VAS providers such as Netcore offer aggregated news ( ) directly to users while almost every broadcaster has a partnership with operators to offer news alerts via a premium SMS. What News Sites Are Doing Will Users Tune In To GPRS?Īaj Tak’s competitor Zee News roped in VAS provider One97 to deliver its news through an SMS subscription pack. Compare it to the 346.9 million mobile connections in that month – a little over a third of the mobile userbase have GPRS enabled handsets. Look at the facts: as of December 2008, there were just 101.10 million wireless data (GPRS, HSDPA, etc) enabled handsets – those who own a mobile Internet enabled handset and not necessarily use mobile Internet. In May, 8.3 million GSM connections were added, and in April, there were 11.9 million CDMA and GSM connections added. Ofcourse, this is primarily in the bottom of the pyramid, subscribers who use basic mobile functions and do not have GPRS enabled. News alerts via SMS have been here for years now, both via on-deck VAS and shortcodes and demand is still growing as millions of connections are added every month in the country. SMS continues to be the most popular medium for delivering value added services. UTV New Media CEO TN Prabhu had told Medianama in an earlier post that developing videos for mobile screens required a lot of editing. It would be interesting to learn what, if any, modifications have been made to the videos to suit mobile screens and if Aaj Tak will be producing a separate section of videos. This would be in addition to the GPRS charges for downloading the videos. National, International, Business, Sports, Entertainment news in Hindi will be pushed to the inbox and the charge is Rs. The MMS clips will be sent twice a day to the mobile and can be accessed by both its CDMA and GSM users, according to WebNewsWire.

Reliance Communications (RCOM) has inked a content partnership with broadcaster Aaj Tak (by the India Today group) to deliver video news updates to mobile subscribers.

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