Hubhopper teams up with Indus OS to ease the access of vernacular audio content across India

Hubhopper has announced a new partnership with Indus OS to take localised audio content to Indian audiences across the country. Indus OS has been developing system apps for Indian smartphone users to discover and consume digital content and services in the language of their choice. They are the first to deeply customize a smartphone experience that meets the real needs of the emerging market’s regional language speaking citizens through innovation, simplification and localisation, therefore connecting the masses to the digital world. Together the two companies have partnered to power millions of devices with podcasts and audio content on Indus One, the minus-one screen for discovering personalized content. This integration will result in users accessing content in over 10 Indian languages on various Indian mobile brands.

Commenting on this collaboration, Gautam Raj Anand, Founder and CEO, Hubhopper said, “Audio is a medium unlike any other. It does not discriminate against language or literacy. We, as Indians, have a rich and beautiful relationship with audio and with storytelling in general. At Hubhopper we are committed to make audio content as accessible and localised as possible as we move further towards this exciting world of smartphone adoption and digitization.”

Rakesh Deshmukh, Co-Founder and CEO of Indus OS, also had to add, “Our focus at Indus OS is to simplify discovery and consumption of digital content and services, thus ensuring a truly inclusive digital growth and an enriched user experience for everyone. With this partnership, our users will have access to high-quality audio content in their preferred language.”

Audio content unsurprisingly strikes a chord with Indian audiences catering to the vast section having grown up listening to the radio, narrative storytelling and poetry recitation, as well as the Indian diaspora still having a strongly marked tradition of oral storytelling. With podcasts now being a new trend as far as audio content consumption is concerned, these could appear as a new take to the conventional radio.

Through the years, Hubhopper has strived to change the way people consume audio content in India. Through its elaborate podcast directory of over a million hours of content across 15 languages and 8 products spread across both the listeners as well as creators of this medium.

Moreover, Anand also states, “the only thing that is new to us is the word ‘podcast’. Indians have been listening to audio narratives and stories for decades. Intertwined in our lives has been the passive or active consumption of content such as religious narratives, poetry, stories of Premchand, Panchatantra, and stories across vernacular languages in general.”

The collaboration is expected to further expand the reach of audio content to additional geographies, enabling easy access to the best and the most relatable audio content for mobile users. This content includes the likes of known shows Stories of Premchand, Red FM Bauaa, The Musafir Stories, BBC Minute India, and top Hubhopper Original shows such as Paranormal Reality, Spanecdotes by Sonata, Karma is a Witch, The Shayari Teller, and hundreds more.