China made growing attempt to invade Indian entertainment industry: Report

According to reports, the Chinese have invested in several Indian news apps over the past several years.

News and eBook app DailyHunt secured a $25 million funding in 2016 led by ByteDance, the same company that owns TikTok, an app that has been banned in India.

With the investment, Bytedance founder & CEO Zhang Yiming joined the Board of Daily Hunt. In 2016, the news aggregator app had a user base of over 120 million app downloads and 28 million monthly active users reading approximately 4.5 billion pages, reports OpIndia.

NewsDog, another news aggregator app, announced a $50 million Series C round in 2018 led by Chinese internet giant Tencent. It claimed to have over 50 million users.

It provided its services in as many as 10 Indian languages. In addition, it established a platform ‘WeMedia’ where users could submit their own stories, reported the news portal.

Chinese investors are also playing a bigger role in the entertainment industry in India.

Xiaomi, a Chinese smartphone company, led a $25-million investment into Hungama Digital Media Entertainment. When the investment was made in 2016, Hungama boasted over 65 million monthly consumers across its music, video, and movie platforms.

At the time, it had partnerships with over 700 content creators and offered over 8,000 movies in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, Punjabi, and other Indian languages on its platform, reports OpIndia.

Gaana, a music streaming service, the largest in India, was the beneficiary of investment to the tune of $115 million led by Tencent, the news portal reported.

“With data prices so low, having easy access to crores of songs which are editorially curated and personally recommended is a better experience than piracy, where quality is unpredictable and selection is limited," Prashan Agarwal, CEO, Gaana had said then as quoted by OpIndia.

“We have penetrated only 5-6% of India. Over the next few years, we want to take this to 20-30%,” he had said. 

“As more affordable mobile data plans are driving smartphone penetration in India, we believe growth in the music streaming market will accelerate. By investing in and collaborating with Gaana, we look forward to bringing more innovation and better experiences to all Indian music lovers,” Tencent President Martin Lau was quoted as saying by OpIndia.

Tencent has made investments in another entertainment platform, MX Player, that offers playback as well as streaming services. In October 2019, it was announced that the platform had raised $110.8 million in financing led by Tencent. India is MX Player’s largest market, with 175 million monthly users until October 2019, reported the news portal.

India fights back:

Amid rising tension across the Line of Actual Control, India on Wednesday banned 118 Chinese apps.

As per the Indian government, these apps were prejudicial to the sovereignty and integrity of India, the Defence of India, Security of State, and Public Order.

"The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India invoking it’s power under section 69A of the Information Technology Act read with the relevant provisions of the Information Technology (Procedure and Safeguards for Blocking of Access of Information by Public) Rules 2009 and in view of the emergent nature of threats has decided to block 118 mobile apps (see Appendix) since in view of information available they are engaged in activities which is prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of state and public order," read a government statement.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology said it has received many complaints from various sources including several reports about the misuse of some mobile apps available on Android and iOS platforms for stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users’ data in an unauthorized manner to servers which have locations outside India.

"The compilation of these data, its mining, and profiling by elements hostile to national security and defence of India, which ultimately impinges upon the sovereignty and integrity of India, is a matter of very deep and immediate concern which requires emergency measures," read the government statement.

The Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre, Ministry of Home Affairs has also sent an exhaustive recommendation for blocking these malicious apps.

Likewise, there have been similar bipartisan concerns, flagged by various public representatives, both outside and inside the Parliament of India.

"There has been a strong chorus in the public space to take strict action against Apps that harm India’s sovereignty as well as the privacy of our citizens," read the statement.