Reliance Communications has launched “Samachar” an text based news service on Reliance Mobile Phones. This service provides text news in Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu. For this service Reliance has tied up with Webdunia.com a regional language content provider for web and mobiles.
Mr. Krishna Durbha, Head – Value Added Services, Reliance Communications said, “We have been providing value added services in various Indian languages for over five years. The launch of Samachar, that’s news in nine languages, will help us grow VAS usage and penetration.”
One should not mistake this service as an sms service as this isnt’t that. This news service is very much like Mytoday’s Nayanaya.mobi except for the fact that this would be available to RCom subscribers via Rworld and for nayanaya.mobi one needs to log on via gprs.
The cost for recieving these news messages isn’t available but given that its Reliance I certainly dont expect this service to be free. On the whole sms and text based news services on mobiles are gaining ground as mobile penetration is gowing each month and with terror strikes, cricket matches, political fiasco’s and business slowdown there is just too much happening in India for an average Indian not to hook into news. The regional language aspect will help in wider distribution and given that Reliance has millions of subscribers Im sure there will be many takers for this service.
