Rediff.com, GR8! tie-up for glossy content

Televisionpoint.com Team
Rediff.com has announced a partnership with India’s television industry glossy, GR8! TV Magazine. This association will allow over 40 million mobile subscribers in India to access GR8! Bollywood and television content ranging from mobile alerts to video clips of serials on their mobile phones, through GPRS or by sending relevant SMS to 7333, Rediff.com’s short code number for distribution of such content.

Subscribers of Orange & Hutch, Airtel, BPL, Idea, Dolphin, BSNL, Reliance Infocom and Tata Indicom across CDMA and GSM networks will be able to instantly access a range of mobile alerts of TV serials, celebrity chats, polling and star tit-bits on SMS by sending a text message with the appropriate key words to 7333, Rediff.com’s short code number for distribution of such content to mobile phones across the country. Premium services like wallpapers, screensavers, videos and much more are also available to subscribers with GPRS connections.

GR8! TV Magazine carries stories about the creators of the genre including directors, technicians, channel honchos and television stars. Considering the fact that, television has excited some of the information nerves of the new generation, the next access point that this generation has is web and mobile.

"Currently mobile subscribers access a variety of entertainment related content over SMS, GPRS, WAP and Voice. We will leverage our online expertise to provide engaging and innovative entertainment content over mobile phones," says Ajit Balakrishnan, Chairman and CEO, Rediff.com India Limited.

Anu Ranjan, Publisher, GR8! Publications and President, The Indian Television Academy said, "We are very excited to offer Indians the ability to customize their mobile phones with celebrities from their favorite TV shows. The new suite of GR8 mobile products that we are developing will provide innovative ways to deliver TV shows-related mobile content. As per our internal readership survey at GR8! we have seen 72% increase in the 18 to 35 years age group and 88% of them would prefer to access TV Stars on their mobile via image downloads, SMS messages, Chat and Video. Acknowledging mobile being ubiquitous with the generation Y lifestyle we had to give them access to their favorite TV stars via Mobile."