Indian radio broadcaster All India Radio (AIR) – which is a division of Prasar Bharti – will soon be introducing its SMS-based news service to send alerts to people who do not use smartphones or any other internet-based phones. The company will be launching the new service and already has a mobile application, which is known as the AIR News.
With this latest move, the company aims to reach out to more and more customers, as not all mobile subscribers use smartphones. In order to make the most out of the service, interested users across India will have to register themselves with AIR. AIR subscribers will be able to receive alerts thrice a day and they will feature 3 to 4 headlines at a time.
The company will have to generate revenue somehow and will be doing so by integrating advertisement tags in the news alerts. The headlines which will be received through SMS will have 100 characters of news and the rest 60 characters will be allocated to various ads.
For this new service, the company needs a database in order to reach out to customers and for this purpose, they will be outsourcing the task of maintaining the database to a third-party firm.
