Airtel on Thursday announced ‘Happy Hours’ for its prepaid customers that will offer them 50 percent data back for all in-app content downloads done between 3am and 5am. In order to execute this offer, Airtel has encouraged developers to integrate the option of scheduling the time for downloads within their apps.
Happy Hours is available to all Airtel prepaid customers by default and does not require an opt-in. Users will benefit on downloading non-urgent in-app content like videos, photos, and music albums as they will receive half of the total data spent on downloads between the given times. For Example, if you schedule a music album download with size 200MB, you will be credited back with 100MB of data.
Airtel has provided a free API to developers for them to integrate the download schedule mechanism, potentially thwarting net neutrality contentions. “Any App developer can integrate with Airtel Happy Hours in four simple steps and give their users the option to automatically schedule downloads between 3.00am and 5.00am so their users get 50 percent data back on downloads,” the company said in an emailed statement.
As of now, YouTube and FastFilmz have already integrated the option and other apps are likely to follow, Airtel said. In order to access this feature, all that an Airtel prepaid customer needs to do inside YouTube app is choose the Smart Offline option on their chosen video and select ‘Save overnight with Airtel Happy Hours’ option to download the video between 3.00am and 5.00am and receive 50 percent of data back.
Interestingly, the company said that it hopes that this new feature will have a positive impact on the overall network experience during the day/peak-hours as ‘Happy Hours’ might help shift some of the non-urgent data traffic to non-peak hours and help reduce congestion.