Xiaomi has launched its latest Mi Music and Mi Videos version in India. The company is planning to compete with the likes of Gaana, Saavn and Amazon Prime Music/Video with the launch of these new products. Xiaomi emerged as the best-selling smartphone brand in late 2017 and is also foraying into other consumer electronics, the latest being television sets.
The new video streaming service also aids the company's sale of television series. It also launched its Mi-TV for ridiculously cheap prices. This clearly shows Xiaomi is trying to create a complete ecosystem around audio and video consumption.
Mi Music will pair with Hungama Music which is South Asia's largest digital entertainment organization. Mi Music will offer more than 10 million "freemium" tracks in 13 Indic plus international languages. The service will provide unlimited lifetime free music streaming with in-app purchases to unlock HD audio.
Users will be able to download music offline only by upgrading to Hungama Pro package with Mi Music for Rs 899 per year.
An impressive feature provided by Mi Music will be the Dynamic Lyrics, using which users will be able to enjoy songs in "karaoke" style. One will be able to surf through a song via lyrics by enabling lyrics to follow the song.
Mi Video will come with Hungama Play, SonyLiv and Voot. The service will have content in 12 video formats - AVI, MP4, MKV, MKA, MPEG, M2TS etc. Videos will also be supported by multilingual subtitles, private folders and multiple audio tracks.
Mi Videos will offer more than 500,000 hours of content and nearly 80 per cent of it will be free. Content in this service will be able to be cast on Smart TV with DLNA and Miracast support. It is promised by the company that in the coming months, more media content partners will be added like TVF, Flickstree, Sun NXT, Zee5, Hotstar, Viu and Alt Balaji.
The company's introduction of music and video streaming services in India indicates that Xiaomi has finally started working on its primary product, which is software. The company sells hardware with an extremely narrow profit margin (recently capped to 5 per cent) but that's only because hardware is a medium to sell their main product, software.
The Mi TV series made waves in the Indian market with its aggressive pricing, similar to how Xiaomi smartphones penetrated the Indian business. Now the company has over 9 million active users on the MIUI public forum. The new services from Xiaomi aim to achieve a similar feat.