Ola launched Ola Play — a connected car platform for ridesharing, in November last year. Now, the company has expanded it to two more cities — Pune and Chennai. With this expansion, it is now present in six cities across India.
Ola Play works as immersive in-car entertainment. For video and music content, it has partnered with platforms such as Apple Music, Qualcomm, Sony Digital, Audio Compass, Fynd, and Mahindra & Mahindra, among others.
The platform uses deep customer insight to offer most relevant and personalised experience Insights from over a thousand cars has revealed that regional language content, radio, web series, and music are a huge hit among Play customers, says the company.
It is powered by proprietary in-car and cloud technologies from Ola, and brings advance car controls, choice of personalised content and a fully connected interactive experience for the users.
Commenting at the launch, Ankit Jain, Vice President and Head of Ola Play said,
Ola Play has been a massive hit amongst users in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, and Hyderabad with its presence in over 50,000 vehicles in the past eight months. We are excited to bring Ola Play to two more large cities today viz. Chennai and Pune…With Play in these two cities, we are enabling lakhs of customers to make efficient use of their transit time by bringing them improved control of their ride-experience.
Ola Play has an open platform, enabling partners and developers to build enriching experiences for the customers. With such offering, the company is promoting the idea of giving control to the customer rather than to the driver.
The offering is similar to Uber’s which partnered with Spotify in 2014 for the integration of its services in order to enable Spotify Premium users on iOS and Android to use it. While that was limited to just Spotify, requiring users to have premium subscription, Ola went a step ahead, offering more content.
The Ola Play offering was already available in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, and Hyderabad. The company claims that Ola Play, launched in November 2016, has witnessed 200 percent quarter-on-quarter growth.