Times Internet’s video on demand service BoxTV has inked its first ISP deal: a tie-up with Spectranet Broadband to offer free subscriptions, operator billing and improved data limits for Spectranet’s fibre customers.
As part of the deal, BoxTV will be offering customers one month premium subscription for free, following which they can sign up for the premium service and charged directly by Spectranet as part of their monthly plan. Spectranet will also be bundling additional 8GB free monthly data dedicated to streaming BoxTV content, which the company says is equal to 10 movies or shows, as part of the plan. The deal period or the terms of the partnership were not disclosed.
BoxTV Business Head Pandurang Nayak told Medianama that all Spectranet Fibre customers have already been pre-registered for the offer and users can enable the service through their existing Spectranet login credentials on Spectranet hosted webpage which is expected to go live shortly. After one month of free usage, users can either choose to either sign up for the service or not. If the user signs up for the service, he will also have an option to cancel his account from the BoxTV website or their Spectranet account.
Medianama Take
In a sense, this is quite similar to the Tata DOCOMO Saavn tie-up last May wherein Tata DOCOMO had launched music-oriented data plans to its 2G and 3G prepaid GSM subscribers, offering a specific amount of Internet data usage along with dedicated amount of data usage to stream Saavn music.
This partnership will allow BoxTV to build consumer awareness by providing a teaser in form of one month free subscription and hope to convert them into paid subscribers. As a next step, BoxTV might want to approach DTH players for doing what Ditto TV has done (albeit with a group company DishTV), and probably provide BoxTV subscriptions as a prize on TimesPoints.
That being said, this development might also raise net neutrality concerns since Spectranet is essentially encouraging customers to use BoxTV by providing free dedicated Internet usage data to stream movies on the service.
