We spoke to Sidhartha Roy, COO at Hungama, and he said the idea came from the fact that an affordable price point had to be offered because the biggest fight was against piracy. “To fight piracy, we need to offer better value, and better experience. And we hope that’s what we are doing with this initiative.”

The service was softlaunched a few months ago, but Roy declined to share any numbers. “But the entire top brass of BSNL, including the chairman, was present at the launch of what is essentially a value added service, says something about how seriously they are taking this.”

When asked about how the revenue share was structured between the telco and the content owners, he said: “Let me just say that it is extremely positive for the content partners. From a government telco, we have a much better deal compared with private telcos.”