Vodafone brings WorldSpace Radio to their customers' mobile phones.

WorldSpace Radio was a big deal to the Indian radio loving community at one point in time. Their proprietary devices and technology were all over the shelves and one day, poof! they were all gone. Back in July of 2011, World Space made a come-back of sorts, but it seemed quite downplayed and proved to be not as popular as it once was. That could change now.

The latest news on that front is that Vodafone India, one of India’s leading telecommunications service providers have launched WorldSpace Radio across 18 circles in India. Their customers will have the opportunity to listen to more than 100,000 songs across 10 channels using their mobile handsets as the receiver. Vodafone India customers, through this service, will have access to all the genres of music round-the-clock, ranging from old Hindi films, regional folk songs and ghazals. This service also offers song collections around various themes that include love songs, sentimental gems and artiste-specials that users can browse through to enjoy at their convenience. Users can thus get the same old stations that they once grew to love - Radio Falak for its ghazals, a bouquet of stations for regional languages, including Gujarati, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi and the 4 southern languages, and Radio Farishta for old Hindi film songs - brought to you by Timbre Media - the very same team of radio professionals who introduced genre based radio in India with WorldSpace.

Vodafone India has tied up with Timbre Media in association with Saregama to provide its customers with what they consider to be the best of radio/music programming and sound packaging. Timbre Media specializes in genre-based radio programming in popular songs and Ghazals in Hindi (old and new), International music, Carnatic and Hindustani classical, songs in regional languages viz. Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Punjabi, Urdu, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam, and spiritual and wellness content. For content, Saregama owns nearly 50 percent of all the music recorded in India in 28 languages; bringing with it the largest repository of the country’s musical heritage.

The Bottom line is, WorldSpace Radio is back on air, even if it is via just a single service. Let’s hope it makes a transition to some of the others to give us all a taste of the vast array of audio at their disposal.

WorldSpace Radio service on Vodafone is live in Uttar Pradesh East & West, Rajasthan, Haryana, Punjab, Mumbai, Bihar, Kerala, Rest of Bengal, Assam, North East, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir, Orissa, Delhi, Tamil Nadu and Chennai. Vodafone India customers can avail this service at a price of Rs.30/month, along with 300 minutes of free usage.

To activate this service, users in these circles can call 58000 (toll free) Or SMS ACT Wradio to 111 (toll free) or USSD on *514*580#