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Eros International has launched an iPad app that offers Bollywood content such as videos, pictures galleries, music, and quiz featuring movies and celebrities. It also offers certain other features including a utility to create Fake movie posters with the user’s own picture, and upload videos and audio clips specific to a particular movie’s promotion. It also claims that 93% of users are active on this app, and there is 100% retention of the app on their devices, but this is on the basis of usage over a 48 hours period of the launch of the app, so it should change over time.
We wonder if all production houses start offering their own apps, wouldn’t they try to limit exclusive content from their own titles from being featured on other content properties?
Our Take
The home screen of the app features a carousel with some content highlights and a set of six buttons that link to specific sections. Strangely an icon that looks like settings takes one to the Favourites screen.The app supports both landscape and portrait orientation and the interface is skinnable since the app features six skins to choose from. There’s also a search feature integrated with the app, however it’s only limited to whatever is available inside the app. All video content is in form of embedded YouTube videos that play within the app. Although the app allows users to save pictures/videos as favourites, there’s no social network integration, which means that users can’t share a particular movie song/video with online friends.
– The Movies section features content such as the trailer, song and making videos, review and link to the Facebook page for new and archived movies, however, at the time of writing this post, it was limited to six movies.
– The Music section features song videos and audio for four movies. The entire soundtrack is available within the app. Again, this is only limited to only four featured movies. This could have been a killer if more movie soundtracks had been added.
– The videos section features a mix of movie trailer/songs videos and gossip content.
– The Photos section offers a Fake Poster utility where users can upload their own pictures and create a fake movie poster and save it to the device. The section offers picture galleries across categories like movie stills, parties and events, and of an actor/star of the week. This makes us feel that the content will be updated on a weekly basis.
– The Celebs section features photos, gossip videos, and tweets from celebs. There is also a Talk to a celeb section that lets users upload audio/video messages. The celeb Tweets section pulls tweets from celeb accounts through the Twitter web interface.
– The last section is a timed quiz offering multiple choice questions.
The app crashed a few times. At times, the fake movie poster utility did not work for us and froze. Overall, the app offers the same content that bollywood portals such as Bollywood Hungama, Buzz18 and others offer, albeit it is a little bit more organised. However, only a few movie titles are featured, so it definitely needs content from more titles.
