Apple is partnering with India’s Bharti Airtel to offer the telecom firm’s premium customers its music and video streaming services for free. This move gives Apple access to thousands of consumers in India, the world’s most populous nation. With mostly English-language content, Apple TV+ is a relatively small player in India’s $28 billion media and entertainment market, where it competes with rivals like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ Hotstar, and JioCinema owned by billionaire Mukesh Ambani.
The partnership comes as competition tightens in India, with the $8.5 billion merger of the Indian media assets of Reliance and Walt Disney facing close scrutiny from antitrust regulators. Airtel announced that “Apple TV+ will come bundled with premium Airtel WiFi and Postpaid plans,” but the deal value for the partnership and information on costs were not disclosed. Furthermore, Apple Music will be available for current premium users of Airtel’s Wynk music app, which will be shut down.
Two sources familiar with the strategy mentioned that the deal aims to help Apple reach a larger pool of consumers with its digital services, given that Airtel is the country’s second-largest telecom operator with 281 million subscribers. Airtel will also announce new tariff plans that include free Apple TV+ offerings. Currently, the Apple TV+ service retails at $9.99 per month in the U.S. and 99 Indian rupees ($1.18) per month in India, compared to Ambani’s JioCinema, which offers cricket content for free and has plans as cheap as 29 rupees a month. Netflix starts with a monthly tariff of 149 rupees.
Cricket is a significant draw for streaming platforms in India, and Apple Music, the Apple TV+ streaming service, and JioCinema all have differing pricing and content focuses. Apple has around 6% of India’s 690 million smartphone users, with the majority of the market being dominated by phones from Samsung and Xiaomi, which run on Google’s Android operating system. Apple Music is currently priced at 99 Indian rupees per month and has a library of 100 million songs
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