LeEco brings Supertainment to you
LeEco, formerly known as Letv, launched its premium video service in India. Dubbed "Supertainment", it promises a range of music and movies across genres powered by the likes of Eros and Hungama for exclusive content. Priced at Rs. 490 a month, or Rs. 4,900 a year, the LeEco Membership is said to be worth Rs. 32,000 as per the company. It includes Le Vidi, Le Music, Le Live, and LeEco Drive.
Le Vidi and Le Music are its bespoke video and music on demand services while Le Live allows users to view concerts as they're happening and LeEco Drive offers 5TB of cloud storage for backing up your data several times over. The Le Vidi and Le Live services will launch on May 24, Le Music and LeEco Drive will be made available in Q3 2016. In addition to this, the company unveiled the Le 1s (Eco) - a smartphone made for India with support for 10 local languages and more to come.
All of this might sound nothing out of the ordinary in a country where new phones and services seem to be rolling out every day, but the company has an ace up its sleeve. One of the biggest reasons for LeEco's success in China is its free hardware day. As the the name suggests, people get smartphones, TVs, and other LeEco hardware free, by paying for content subscriptions. It's a model that founder Jia Yueting takes great pride in.
"On April 14, we held the first free hardware day in China, when we had sales for our smartphones, TVs on our website. We believe that the world is heading for an ecosystem era, where hardware will be irrelevant and rather users will be more interested in the content, value they can get from a device," Yueting announced during an event in Beijing last month. "Sales of content exceeded two billion RMB [roughly Rs. 20 billion]. When we make hardware free and stand by users, we put ourselves against competition and have shaken the basis of how the industry has functioned."
