Hungama, the digital entertainment company of well known hungama mobile is soon set to launch it’s digital download service soon, the content offered through the service include bollywood and regional songs, ringtones, wallpapers and videos. The most interesting thing is that apart from other pricing plans Hungama is offering an unlimited download option for just 99/- Rs a month
A very tempting an offer for legal downloads or not?
The very offer of unlimited legal multimedia downloads for 99/- seduced me to signup for the service, I loved songs.pk earlier for the free mp3 (illegal) downloads but what made me averse to it eventually was the virus scare. Hungama’s 99/- a month for unlimited mp3 downloads besides other content seems like an offer difficult to refuse,but what makes it a disappointment for the user is that the multimedia content is DRM protected with audio tracks in WMA format and cannot play it using my favorite winamp player. Hungama controls the content transfer between PC’s and mobile as one can only transfer the content using Hungama myplay, and also the download of the same content from hungama is limited to 3 times.
A user can also choose to download the audio and video tracks using other price plans which let user to transfer to between PC’s and mobile, the pricing options are:
Hungama.com has an impressive collection, the library includes 100,000 audio tracks,ring tones,dialogue tracks,20,000 videos and over 50,000 mobile wallpapers. Hungama tied-up with the many leading Indian record labels including Yash Raj Films, Big Music, Think Music, Adlabs Films, Pritish Nandy Communications besides others and Shemaroo Entertainment for the content.
The service has a toolbar for web-browsers too for content discovery, though it seems like an obvious solution for content discovery, I am not sure if this is going to help, at least I am averse to the add-on toolbars.
Mobile application
I installed the mobile application, Hungama MyPlay on my E71 and while I tried accessing the app, it repeatedly kept popping up “Allow application Hungama MyPlay to read user data”, me clicking Yes repeatedly and re-booting my mobile did not help.
Hungama is also going to come up with a desktop player soon, but with the availability of so many good players this app doesn’t seem to provide any value addition to the user.
Hungama has setup a call center to alleviate user’s problems downloading content, a user can call up on one of the two available numbers. This is indeed a great value addition as Indian Mobile VAS lacks good customer care
