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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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Ticketmaster May Have Misled UK Oasis Fans, Watchdog Says

A view of a mural of Oasis band members Liam and Noel Gallagher by artist Pic.One.Art on the side of Sifters record shop in the Burnage area of Manchester, Britain, August 31, 2024. (Reuters)
A view of a mural of Oasis band members Liam and Noel Gallagher by artist Pic.One.Art on the side of Sifters record shop in the Burnage area of Manchester, Britain, August 31, 2024. (Reuters)
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Ticketmaster May Have Misled UK Oasis Fans, Watchdog Says

A view of a mural of Oasis band members Liam and Noel Gallagher by artist Pic.One.Art on the side of Sifters record shop in the Burnage area of Manchester, Britain, August 31, 2024. (Reuters)
A view of a mural of Oasis band members Liam and Noel Gallagher by artist Pic.One.Art on the side of Sifters record shop in the Burnage area of Manchester, Britain, August 31, 2024. (Reuters)

Ticketmaster may have misled music fans into paying more for tickets than they had planned last year to see British band Oasis, the UK's competition watchdog said on Tuesday, urging the company to change how it labels tickets and informs customers.

Thousands of fans waited for hours online to get their hands on highly coveted tickets for the band's 2025 reunion shows, only to find prices had jumped by the time they got to the front of the queue.

"We’re concerned that Oasis fans didn’t get the information they needed or may have been misled into buying tickets they thought were better than they were," said Hayley Fletcher, interim senior director of consumer protection at the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).

The watchdog said it was concerned that Ticketmaster may have breached consumer law. CMA does not currently have power to levy fines for breaching consumer laws, which are enforced through the court system.

A Ticketmaster statement said that it aimed to provide a "simple, transparent and consumer-friendly experience" and welcomed the CMA's input.

The CMA launched an investigation into Ticketmaster in September to examine if it had engaged in "unfair commercial practices," and if they were pressured to buy tickets within a short period of time.

The CMA originally said it was also looking at how dynamic pricing models - a form of surge pricing - may have been used, but Ticketmaster has said it did not use dynamic pricing models.

The outcry over the way the ticket sale process was managed became a hot political topic, spurring Prime Minister Keir Starmer to promise to get a grip on the wider issue of event tickets being sold at inflated prices.

The government has since announced proposals to cap resale prices and hold reselling websites more accountable.

The CMA issued an update on its findings on Tuesday outlining two main concerns.

One was that seats labelled as "platinum" were sold at a premium without consumers being made fully aware that they didn't come with any extra benefits.

Another was insufficient information provided to buyers at the start of the queue on different ticket categories and their prices if cheaper tickets were sold out before their turn to buy.

The CMA said Ticketmaster had made some changes since the investigation began, but that more work was still needed.

"We now expect Ticketmaster to work with us to address these concerns so, in future, fans can make well-informed decisions when buying tickets," the CMA's Fletcher said.