Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi is leading a $25-million (about Rs 165.4 crore) funding in content provider Hungama Digital Media Entertainment, which also has ace investor Rakesh Jhunjhunwala on board.
The investment comes in as mobile broadband speed gets faster in India and 4G networks are rolled out in many parts of the country. The investment in Hungama is Xiaomi's first in an Indian company and it is open to more such opportunities, VP Hugo Barra said "Hungama will help the company strengthen its local content and services portfolio in India."
"Our Video on Demand (VoD) service in China has 100 million installs and 30 million daily active users. 4G has played a major role in this. India isnow on the verge of witnessing a similar data explosion and we wanted to ensure that we have a big play in this segment," Barra said, adding that Xiaomi will be able to integrate Hungama's content into its own line of smartphones.
Hungama has partnerships with over 700 content creators, and has over 8,000 movies in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, Punjabi and six other Indian regional languages on its platform.
Over 65 million monthly active consumers across platforms access Hungama for its music, video and movie services, the company said. The funding round also saw participation from existing investors Intel Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners and billionaire Rakesh Jhunjhunwala.
"With this investment, we intend to further strengthen our movie and TV services and Hungama Play will shortly add 1,500 hours of TV content in vernacular languages and English," said Neeraj Roy, founder and CEO of Hungama. Xiaomi had entered India in July 2014. It started local assembly of smartphones last year and over 75% of its smartphones sold in India at present are made locally.
So the conclusion is that you will get Hungama application preloaded on your new MI gadgets as a music app. They have the full plans to come over the big brands like Samsung in India.
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