- Xiaomi has joined hands with Hungama Music, Voot, SonyLiv and other media content partners to offer Mi Music and Mi Video
- Almost 80% of the content on Mi Music and Video services are free
After becoming the numero uno smartphone brand in late 2017, Xiaomi launched feature-rich Mi TV series for dirt cheap prices, disrupting the home entertainment industry in February 2018. Now, the company has set its eyes on online media content service, which is dominated by Amazon Prime Video and Netflix.
"Xiaomi's core belief lies in providing high-quality products with the best specs, at an honest pricing. We are able to do this because of our business model — we provide our smartphones and other hardware at affordable pricing, aiming to monetize our MIUI Internet services in the long run. With the launch of these two apps Mi Music and Mi Video, we hope to serve millions of Xiaomi smartphone users with a better user experience through enhanced Internet services," Manu Jain, Vice President, Xiaomi and Managing Director, Xiaomi India, said in a statement.
Initially, Xiaomi's Mi Music package will come with Hungama Music, South Asia's largest digital entertainment organization with more than 400 content partners across geographies and languages. Mi Music offers more than 10 million freemium tracks across 13 Indic language choices.
The notable aspect of Xiaomi Mi Music is the Dynamic Lyrics which offers users a "karaoke" song experience wherein he/she allow the lyrics to follow the song in a 'Karaoke' fashion and scroll through songs via lyrics.
The new music service will offer unlimited lifetime free music streaming service. Users can also download music offline but have to upgrade to Hungama Pro package within Mi Music, for Rs 899 per year.
On the other hand, Xiaomi Video service is currently powered by Hungama Play, SonyLiv, and Voot. With the partnership, it is said to offer more than 500,000 hours of content with nearly 80% free content.
The service currently supports 12 video formats such as AVI, MP4, MOV, MKV, and MKA, MPEG, M2TS amongst others. It also supports multilingual subtitles, private folders, and multiple audio tracks. The Mi Video subscriber can also cast the video content on any Smart TV with DLNA and Miracast support. The company has promised to add more media content partners including TVF, Flickstree, Sun NXT, Zee5, Hotstar, Viu and Alt Balaji in coming months.
