At its press event in Mumbai on Tuesday, Chinese smartphone brand, LeEco, launched its streaming and on-demand services platform in India, bringing “content, service and experience” in one single ‘Supertainment’ package, which will include on-demand video service, ‘Le Vidi’, music streaming service, ‘Le Music’ and live TV service, ‘Le Live’. While Le Vidi and Le Live will launch on the 24th of this month, Le Music will be available from the third quarter of this year. Along with its entertainment services, the company also unveiled a cloud storage service (LeEco Drive) that will bring 5 TB of storage to all subscribers. That particular service, too, will launch in the third quarter of this year, according to LeEco. As for its so-called Supertainment package, the company is offering only a single tier that would cost users Rs. 490 ($7.5) per month or Rs. 4,900 ($75) for a year if paid in full upfront.
The company also took the opportunity to launch a tweaked version of its LeEco 1s mid-range smartphone that was originally launched in the country earlier this year and has been well-received by the tech media as well as by the buying public at large. The new smartphone, called the Le 1s Eco, comes with similar hardware to the LeEco 1s, but is priced lower and runs on Android Marshmallow, whereas the original device came with Android Lollipop out of the box. The newly-launched device is manufactured in India and comes with a free one-year subscription to the LeEco Membership. The device will be available exclusively on Flipkart at an introductory price of Rs. 9,999 in its first flash sale, which will take place at 2pm on May 12th. The company says that it will put up 100,000 units for sale on that day. The company also said that it will bring its smart TVs to India within the next couple of months.
Meanwhile, as for the content part of the LeEco Membership, the company launched a new app called Le Vidi, which will be available on all LeEco devices sold in the country and will also be available for download from the Google Play Store. It is an open syndication platform that will pull popular videos from various video hosting services like YouTube on the one hand and feature exclusive content on the other. Towards that end, the company has tied up with production houses like Eros Now, which is a content creator with a library of over 22,000 movies across 10 Indian languages. For Le Music, the company says it has tied up with music streaming service, Hungama, which reportedly has a catalog of over 3.5 million songs in 22 different languages. The company also announced that it has a deal in place with YuppTV which brings over 250 online channels including live TV (called Le Live) with multiple viewing angles.