Vringo's Video Ringtone Service Launched On Tata DOCOMO

Tata DOCOMO, the unified telecom brand of Tata Teleservices Limited today announced a new VAS offering in the form of a video ringtone service called 'Vringo'. The service is powered by Hungama and is available for Tata DOCOMO's GSM customers across circles.

Vringo, the video ringtones and mobile app development company which is offering the service through Tata DOCOMO, already has mobile apps in Google Play's app store and Aircel PocketApps, among others.

With Tata DOCOMO, it's being offered as a service which costs Re 1 per day (with auto renewal) and it includes access to Tata DOCOMO's video ringtones library. Apart from the daily subscription charge, customers will also have to pay data charges (as per their data plan) if/when they download videos from the portal.

Hungama is handling the distribution of the Vringo service in India and the company is also providing Vringo with premium content from its content catalogue to add to its video ringtone library. The company is working on a revenue share basis with Vringo.

The Vringo portal will allow users to download videos from different genres like Bollywood, devotional, ads, among others and then set them as their video ringtones.

To activate the service, Tata DOCOMO customers have to visit https://tatadocomo.vringo.com on their phone's mobile browser and register on it (this page will also act as their homepage for managing their video ringtones collection). Once registered, customers can browse from a series of Vringo categories or search for new Vringos (video ringtones) and if they like a Vringo, they can click and 'download' it.

As of now, Tata Teleservices (Maharashtra) Limited (TTML) has operations on the CDMA, GSM and 3G platforms and has 17.6 million customers. Tata Group through TTML and the privately held flagship telecom firm Tata Teleservices Limited (TTL) has a pan-India presence across all of India's 22 telecom circles. TTL operates in more than 450,000 towns and villages across the country and has over 90 million subscribers.

Anjan Patole, COO, Mumbai Circle, TTML said, "Video ringtone is definitely a 'zing' thing that will entice our GSM customers. Vringo is first ever service in the Indian industry and customers can choose a video from a vast collection of videos available."

Last we checked, the various genres available on the site included featured, top 10, devotional, Bollywood, ads, cinema and TV, fun, fashion and style, sports and greetings. The website also allows users to check whether their mobile phone models will support the service in the first place. We must add, an Internet connection will be required on the mobile phones for accessing and downloading new Vringos. Additionally, we feel that the service will work better for large screen phones since it will showcase the video ringtones better.

Tata DOCOMO might be the first ones to offer Vringo as a service, but the fact that the app is already available for download on Google play means that Android users can still set video ringtones on their phones even if they don't have a Tata DOCOMO connection. Similarly, Aircel customers can also download the app from Aircel PocketApps. But the key difference is that since Tata DOCOMO is offering it as a service in tie-up with Hungama.com, the users will have access to a lot of content from the start, while if you download the app, you will have to look for videos that can be set as video ringtones.

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