Indian Railways to provide Content on Demand Service (CoD) on Trains and Stations

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Content on Demand (CoD) will soon be available in all Premium/Express/Mail trains and Suburban trains of Indian Railways. With an aim to generate more non-fare revenue, Railway Board had entrusted RailTel, a miniratna PSU under Ministry of Railways, with providing the Content on Demand service to passengers in trains. On its part, RailTel has selected M/s Margo Network, a subsidiary of Zee Entertainment as the Digital Entertainment Service Provider (DESP) for providing Content on Demand (CoD) Service on trains and railway stations. The project will be implemented in two years and the provision of content such as movies, shows, educational programs, etc. will be made available both in paid and unpaid formats for a contract period of 10 years which includes the first two years of implementation.

In this project for Indian Railways, RailTel will provide various pre-loaded multilingual content (Movies, Music Videos, General Entertainment, Lifestyle, etc) in moving trains through media servers installed in trains. CoD platform will also provide e-commerce/m-commerce services in various domains e.g. travel bookings (cab, bus, train) and provide various innovative solutions in the digital marketing domain. With CoD, passengers will be able to enjoy uninterrupted free/ Subscription based entertainment service and high-Quality buffer-free streaming across personal devices during their train journey. The content will be periodically refreshed.

Talking about the project, Puneet Chawla, CMD/RailTel, said that the full rollout will be completed by 2022. The Content on Demand service will not only improve overall passenger experience but at the same time will increase the non-fare revenue through multiple monetization models. The scope covers all 17 Zones of Indian Railways. The earning from the project will be majorly through three streams e.g. Advertisement based monetization, Subscription-based monetization and E-Commerce/Partnership Services.

A total of approximately 8731 trains which include 3003 trains (Premium/Mail/Express- to and fro) pan India and 2864 pairs of Suburban Trains (total 5728 trains) have been kept in the scope of the service rollout. Also CoD will be available at all Wi-Fi enabled Railway Stations which has crossed 5563 Railway stations as on date.

Also read: Indian Railways partners with Microsoft Kaizala for healthcare facilities

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