Leveraging its vast network, All India Radio has launched a free SMS service to provide news updates to its subscribers. The service was launched by Information and Broadcasting Minister Manish Tewari here on Monday.
The service, which started as a pilot project six months ago and gathered over two lakh subscribers, is now being thrown open to the public and intends to gather a 5-lakh subscriber base by the month end.
After subscription, AIR will send free messages with news and even public utility messages.
To subscribe, one should SMS ‘AIRNEWS’
AIR intends to recover the cost of sending messages through ministries and departments who want to send their utility message along with the news updates. “The resource generated through such public utility schemes will enable the News Services Division of AIR to bear the cost incurred towards generating such SMSes,” said an official statement.
UPA Going Ad Way
Eyeing the 2014 polls, the UPA Government has resorted to heavy advertising of its schemes under the Bharat Nirman in nearly 11 lakh spots spread across TV, radio, print and outdoor media.
Launching an interactive online web portal on the UPA initiatives on Monday, Information and Broadcasting Minister Manish Tewari described the reach of the ad campaign.
“32,612 audio-visual spots have been telecast in phase-I and over 36,000 in phase-II so far. Over 7.50 lakh subscribers have been reached via Twiter and Facebook. In the print space also, over 27,000 insertions have been done in over 700 papers in phase I and II. Community radio has also been included in the campaign.”
Apart from TV and radio ads, the Centre also run advertisements in digital cinemas.