Airtel and Meta collaborate to accelerate India’s digital ecosystem

Airtel and Meta collaborate

Telugu duper news,New Delhi, December 6, 2022: Bharti Airtel (“Airtel”), India’s premier digital communications solutions provider, and Meta Platforms, Inc. (“Meta”) today announced a collaboration to support the growth of India’s digital ecosystem. Airtel and Meta will jointly invest in global connectivity infrastructure and CPaaS based new-age digital solutions to support the emerging requirements of customers and enterprises in India.

Foundational connectivity infrastructure such as subsea cable systems are crucial for supporting the rising demand for high-speed data and digital services as India prepares to roll out 5G networks later this year. With the constant endeavor to augment the nation’s infrastructure, Airtel will partner with Meta and STC to extend 2Africa Pearls to India. 2Africa is the world’s longest subsea cable system and is expected to provide faster internet connectivity to almost 3 billion people globally. Airtel and Meta will extend the cable to Airtel’s landing station in Mumbai and also pick up dedicated capacity to further strengthen its submarine network portfolio. The 2Africa cable will significantly boost India’s cable capacity and empower global hyper-scalers and businesses to build new integrated solutions and provide a high-quality seamless experience to customers.

As members of the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) Open RAN project group, Airtel and Meta have been pioneers of Open RAN technologies with the shared goal of increasing ecosystem diversity, driving innovation, and cost-efficiency in connectivity networks. Airtel has signed an agreement to help increase operational efficiency of Open RAN and facilitate energy management and automation in radio networks using advanced analytics and AI/ML models.  Airtel is currently conducting trials for 4G and 5G Open RAN solutions on select sites in the state of Haryana and will commercially deploy the solution across several locations in India over the next few quarters. Airtel will share its learnings with wider ecosystem partners within the TIP community, including Meta, to help accelerate the deployment of Open RAN based networks across the world.  

Businesses in India are rapidly shifting to cloud-based solutions to serve their customers digitally. Airtel IQ, the world’s first network embedded Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) ecosystem, offers cloud communication across voice, messaging and video channels to help enterprises transform their customer engagement and drive profitability by leveraging automation and boosting revenue. Airtel will integrate Meta’s WhatsApp within its CPaaS platform. With this integration, businesses will now be able to use WhatsApp’s rich features and reach to provide an unparalleled omni-channel customer engagement to enterprises.                

Vani Venkatesh, CEO – Global Business, Bharti Airtel said: “We, at Airtel, are delighted to deepen our partnership with Meta to serve India’s digitally connected economy by leveraging the technology and infrastructure strengths of both companies. With our contributions to the 2Africa cable and Open RAN, we are investing in crucial and progressive connectivity infrastructure which is needed to support the increasing demand for high-speed data in India. We look forward to working closely with Meta to deliver best-in-class digital experiences to our customers in India.”

Airtel and Meta collaborate

Francisco Varela, vice president of mobile partnerships for Meta said: “Subsea cables and open, disaggregated networks continue to play a huge role in the foundational infrastructure needed to support network capacity and fuel innovation. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with Airtel to further advance the region’s connectivity infrastructure that will enable a better network experience for people and businesses across India.”

Introducing Wynk Studio, India’s largest music distribution ecosystem for independent artists 

Introducing-Wynk-Studio

Wynk Music, India’s number 1 music streaming app by downloads and daily active users today introduced Wynk Studio, India’s largest music distribution ecosystem for independent artists based in India and overseas. The studio will enable artists to launch their music and will also partner them in monetizing their music on a host of platforms and will be a part of Airtel’s digital products portfolio which includes Wynk, Airtel Xstream, Airtel Ads, Airtel IQ among others. 

Wynk Studio is Airtel’s leap towards accelerating the music ecosystem in India. The studio plans to launch 5000 independent artists on the platform in the next 1 year. This will bring forward unknown talent stymied by music industry’s three most pressing problems – Discovery, Monetization and Analytics, which together determine the difference between success and failure in the Indian music industry.

The Indian music industry is at an inflection point. Indians on average spend about 21 hours per week listening to music as against a global average of 18 hours. Almost 30% of the top performing songs across any music platform in India are today from independent artists and these independent artists are all set to drive the growth of the industry by 50% from roughly 2000Cr at the moment to 3000Cr by 2025. 

Here is how Wynk Studio helps an artist

  1. Discovery – Enabling artists to launch their music on the Wynk music app and also other music platforms. Music listeners can save, download and even follow their favourite artists on the Wynk app. 
  2. Monetization – Helps emerging artists to achieve record streams in competitive timelines through the support of Airtel’s strong distribution capabilities. This ensures consistent earnings for artists on every stream enabling them to make their music career. 
  3. Transparency & Data Analytics – Using Airtel’s deep data science capabilities, artists can now build music that is enjoyed by their followers and helping them create commercially viable music. 
Introducing-Wynk-Studio

With Wynk Studio as a medium and helped by Airtel’s unparalleled reach, Independent artists have an unprecedented opportunity to take their voice to the audience directly. Wynk has also earmarked a sum of Rs 100 Cr to promote local talent on the application and enable their discovery. 

Wynk Studio already has over 100 artists on the platform from India, Singapore and the United States with some such as Nishad Patki from Pune, a banker by profession leaving their job to pursue their passion for music full time. Mumbai-based Prateek Gandhi (34 million streams) Gagan Baderiya from Bengaluru (17 million streams) and Harsha Prawin from Hyderabad (20 million streams) and small town sensations Ajay Nagarkoti from Haldwani and D-Shaw from Vapi are some of the artists doing over a million streams each. 

Commenting on the launch, Mr. Adarsh Nair, CEO – Airtel Digital, “The creator economy for music is at a nascent stage but poised to grow significantly. With Wynk Studio, we are building a platform that allows an aspiring musician to pursue their passion and earn income at the same time. Airtel’s experience in music streaming, ability to achieve scale, and long standing relationship with over 350 million customers will ensure that all stakeholders in the industry have an equal and a rewarding journey. We are looking to attract talent from across the world and scale the platform to 5000 artists in the next 1 year.” 

Over the past few years, there has been a surge in consumer demand for regional music, even as Bollywood and International music continue to be big draws. As the smartphone penetration increases, so is the demand for local artists who perform in regional languages and dialects. Wynk offers music in 15 Indian languages and regional songs now account for over 30% of the overall streams on the app. Songs in Oriya, Gujarati, Assamese, Marathi, Telugu and Bhojpuri have seen 150% + growth and are also popular outside the home states as well. 

Introducing-Wynk-Studio

The Wynk Music journey:

  • Sept 2014: Launched in India; crosses 1 lakh downloads in 4 days
  • Feb 2015: Crosses 5 million app downloads
  • June 2015: Launches Data Save Mode
  • Nov 2015: Crosses 12 million installs
  • Jan 2016: Introduces MP3 Player Function- Plays Local MP3 files
  • Mar 2017: Crosses 50 million installs
  • Jan 2018: Crosses 75 million installs
  • Dec 2018: Voted India’s most entertaining app on Playstore
  • Jan 2019: Crosses 100 million installs

For more details visit https://studio.wynk.in/