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Apple Eyes Bigger Slice of India's Streaming, Music Market with Airtel Deal

FILE PHOTO: An Apple logo is pictured in an Apple store in Paris, France, March 6, 2024. REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: An Apple logo is pictured in an Apple store in Paris, France, March 6, 2024. REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes/File Photo
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Apple Eyes Bigger Slice of India's Streaming, Music Market with Airtel Deal

FILE PHOTO: An Apple logo is pictured in an Apple store in Paris, France, March 6, 2024. REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: An Apple logo is pictured in an Apple store in Paris, France, March 6, 2024. REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes/File Photo

Apple is tying up with India's Bharti Airtel to offer the telecom firm's premium customers its music and video streaming services for free, giving the US giant access to thousands of consumers in the world's most populous nation.
With mostly English-language content, Apple TV+ is a small player in India's $28 billion media and entertainment market, where its rivals include Netflix, Amazon Prime Video , Disney+ Hotstar and billionaire Mukesh Ambani's JioCinema.
The move comes as competition tightens in India and an $8.5-billion merger of the Indian media assets of Reliance and Walt Disney - which have a streaming service each - faces close scrutiny from antitrust regulators.
"Apple TV+ will come bundled with premium Airtel WiFi and Postpaid plans," Airtel said in a statement on Tuesday, though the companies did not disclose a deal value for the partnership or information on costs.
Apple Music will also be available for current premium users of Airtel's Wynk music app, which will be shut down. Its employees are being subsumed by the company, Reuters quoted Airtel as saying.
Two sources familiar with the strategy said that for Apple, the deal is aimed at reaching out to a much bigger pool of consumers with its digital services given Airtel is the country's second biggest telecom operator with 281 million subscribers.
Ambani's Reliance Jio telecom service has 489 million users.
The Apple TV+ streaming service, known for its original series like Ted Lasso, The Morning Show and Slow Horses, has so far differentiated itself in the streaming landscape with a focus on in-house content.
Most rival platforms in India and overseas offer users older movies and TV shows from other studios, as well as their own originals.
Airtel will within days announce new tariff plans that will include free Apple TV+ offerings, said two other sources with direct knowledge of its plans.
Currently, the Apple TV+ service retails at $9.99 per month in the US 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 monthly tariff of 149 rupees.
Cricket is seen as a way to attract more customers to streaming platforms in India, and Disney lost millions of Indian users last year when it lost streaming rights to Ambani's Reliance for streaming the world's richest cricket tournament, the Indian Premier League.
Apple has 6% of India's 690 million smartphone users, according to data from research firm Counterpoint. The remaining market is dominated by phones from Samsung and Xiaomi, and are powered by 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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Movie Review: Coon, Olsen and Lyonne Await a Father’s Death in ‘His Three Daughters’ 

This image released by Netflix shows, from left, Elizabeth Olsen, Carrie Coon and Natasha Lyonne in a scene from "His Three Daughters." (Netflix via AP)
This image released by Netflix shows, from left, Elizabeth Olsen, Carrie Coon and Natasha Lyonne in a scene from "His Three Daughters." (Netflix via AP)
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Movie Review: Coon, Olsen and Lyonne Await a Father’s Death in ‘His Three Daughters’ 

This image released by Netflix shows, from left, Elizabeth Olsen, Carrie Coon and Natasha Lyonne in a scene from "His Three Daughters." (Netflix via AP)
This image released by Netflix shows, from left, Elizabeth Olsen, Carrie Coon and Natasha Lyonne in a scene from "His Three Daughters." (Netflix via AP)

Death isn’t like it is in the movies, a character explains in “His Three Daughters.” Elizabeth Olsen’s Christina is telling her sisters, Katie (Carrie Coon) and Rachel (Natasha Lyonne), a story about their father, who became particularly agitated one evening while watching a movie on television in the aftermath of his wife’s passing.

It’s not exactly a fun memory, or present, for any of them. This is, after all, also a movie about death.

The three women have gathered in their father’s small New York apartment for his final days. He’s barely conscious, confined to a room that they take shifts monitoring as they wait out this agonizingly unspecific clock. But even absent the stresses of hospice, tensions would be high for Christina, Katie and Rachel, estranged and almost strangers who are about to lose the one thread still binding them. Taken together, it’s a pressure cooker and a wonderful showcase for three talented actors.

Writer-director Azazel Jacobs has scripted and filmed “His Three Daughters,” streaming Friday on Netflix, like a play. The dialogue often sounds more scripted than conversational (except for Lyonne, who makes everything sound her own); the locations are confined essentially to a handful of rooms in the apartment, with the communal courtyard providing the tiniest bit of breathing room.

Jacobs drops the audience into the middle of things, dolling out background and information slowly and purposefully. Coon’s Katie gets the first word, a monologue really, about the state of things as she sees it and how this is going to work. She’s the eldest, a type-A ball of anxiety, the mother of a difficult teenage daughter and the type of person who can barely conceal either disappointment or deep resentment.

Katie also lives in Brooklyn, not far from her father, but rarely ever visited. Caretaking duties were left to Lyonne’s Rachel, an unemployed stoner who never left home, likes to bet on football games and is poised to inherit the apartment – to the not-so-subtle resentment of her sisters. The youngest is Christina, a head-in-the-clouds, conflict averse yogi and Grateful Dead follower who lives across the country and has had to leave her 3-year-old for the first time.

Jacobs is unafraid of allowing both drama and humor to coexist, to seep into moments unexpectedly. There is an undeniable absurdity to the act of writing an obituary for a loved one in a fraught time like hospice that actually captures a life and a person and doesn’t sound like a laundry list of biographical facts and positive attributes. Add to that the fact that Katie is also frantically trying to get a medical professional to the apartment to witness a DNR order. The women are torn in premature grief, wanting him to stay alive but also go quickly.

They’re all richly drawn and perfectly mysterious too, even to themselves; Jacobs is too smart and attuned to how humans are to give anyone a simple, straightforward explanation. Everyone is making assumptions about others — many of them are wrong, or, at the very least misguided. Coon, with her booming, theatrical voice, is particularly suited playing this slightly terrifying, massively judgmental perfectionist. Lyonne, so good at cool deflection, gets to use that otherworldliness to hit a different kind of note: quiet heartbreak. And Olsen, playing a character, really shines in her non-verbal choices: A reaction, a moment alone that she doesn’t know is being observed. It won’t be surprising if any or all get some recognition this awards season (unfortunately in a system that is uniquely ill-equipped to fete small ensembles with three leads).

There are some movies that die quiet deaths on streaming-first (this did receive a bit of a theatrical run), but “His Three Daughters” is one that seems right on Netflix just for its ability to reach a larger audience than it would stand a chance to at the multiplex. It’s never not riveting watching it all unfold, even with the temptation of the phone nearby. Whether you make it a solo viewing experience or a group one might have everything to do with your own relationship with family members.

And to that initial indictment about movies not getting death right? It’s still probably true. But movies like “His Three Daughters” might help us all make a little bit more sense of the inevitable.