Airtel to offer free Apple TV+, Music subscriptions: What does it mean for India’s competitive OTT space?

The offers on Apple TV+ and Apple Music for Airtel premium customers will become available later this year. “Large screen video content viewership is growing at a fast pace in India, and there is a large appetite for high quality video content among Indian users,” Airtel said in a press release.

The telecom major has over 281 million subscribers in India while its top contender, Reliance Jio, has a subscriber base of 489 million. Airtel’s broadband plan, Xstream Fiber, already offers subscribers a large selection of streaming content and will soon include Apple TV+ as an additional offering.

A strategic move?

While the exact terms of the deal between Apple and Airtel are unclear, the partnership could potentially introduce Apple’s streaming services to thousands of new Indian customers and challenge bigger players such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ Hotstar, and JioCinema in the price-sensitive streaming market in India.

On the other end of the pact, Airtel may have found an attractive substitute in Apple Music as it is reportedly pulling the plug on its music streaming app, Wynk, and absorbing all its employees. Airtel Wynk was initially in talks to merge with another popular music streaming app called Gaana. But the deal fell through, and Gaana ended up being sold for Rs 25 lakh to Entertainment Network India Limited (ENIL), the parent company of Radio Mirchi.

Wynk Music was launched by Airtel in 2014 and currently has about 100 million subscribers. Its monthly subscription plans range from Rs 49 to Rs 99.

What the move means for streaming in India

Given India’s cluttered over the top (OTT) market, analysts have pointed out that there has been a rise in subscription fatigue among Indian consumers. “This has created a space for OTT aggregators, allowing users to discover and view streaming content from multiple OTT apps in one place,” read a 2024 report by Ernst & Young (EY) and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry (FICCI).

The report forecasts the expansion of OTT aggregator services such as Airtel Xstream, OTTplay, and Times Group as “these platforms offer distribution scale to smaller OTT apps focusing on regional or international content, and who are looking to create visibility and build reach in the country.”

The latest partnership between Apple and Airtel underscores this trend of bundling of online content, as more ISPs and telcos look to package their carrier plans with subscriptions to multiple OTT services. Last year, Netflix announced a partnership with Reliance Jio where prepaid customers are offered mobile-only subscriptions to the streaming platform.

These tie-ups come in the backdrop of a Rs 70,350-crore merger between Reliance and Indian assets owned by Walt Disney such as Star India. The mega deal was cleared by the the Competition Commission of India (CCI) on Wednesday, August 28, which means that the joint venture will control two major streaming platforms, Disney+ and JioCinema, along with other TV channels, cricket broadcasting rights, and more.