Exclusive: JioCinema APK teardown reveals probable new name and plan details

The rumour mill had already been running with talks of a possible merger between Viacom 18’s streaming platforms Voot and JioCinema, the latter being previously a part of Jio Platforms Ltd. before it was handed over to Viacom 18 which recently announced the completion of the transfer process.

These rumours had been rubbished by a Viacom 18 spokesperson in January when he said that there were no plans of merging the two platforms as of now. He had said that while Voot was meant to carry Viacom 18’s TV programming digitally, JioCinema served the role of a content aggregator and the flagship Sporting events platform for Viacom 18.

Contrary to this, a recent teardown of the JioCinema APK by our OnlyTech community forums member xcap6456 has revealed that the probable name of the Voot and JioCinema merged streaming platform may be JioVoot and the rebranding may happen sooner rather than later.

Viacom 18 had recently revealed its slate of 100 titles comprising of both Movies as well as web series by Jio Studios which it said would be added to JioCinema before the end of the current IPL on 28th May. The company spokesperson also revealed that after the fresh content addition, Viacom 18 would start charging a subscription fee and would operate on a Freemium model, whereby some premium content will be behind the paywall while some ad-supported content will be available to stream for free.

As of now Viacom 18 has not revealed the pricing strategy for Jio Cinema but the APK teardown also reveals that the plans could start as low as Rs 99. It also reveals that the plan may be named ‘Super Plan’ and there may be other plans of which the details are not clear at the moment.

JioCinema app which is streaming the current season of the Indian Premier League Cricket series for free for the first time has already crossed 10 crore downloads on the Google Play Store and registered more than 2.4 crore simultaneous viewers for the Chennai Super Kings VS Royal Challengers Bangalore match. Viacom 18 will be looking to cash in on the opportunity with its TV and Movie offerings on the app.