Looking to increase non-fare revenue, India Railways will soon offer movies, shows, music videos and educational programs on demand to travellers for a small cost.

The Content on Demand (CoD) service will soon be available in all premium, express, mail and suburban trains across all 17 zones of Indian Railways.

RailTel, a miniratna PSU under Ministry of Railways, which was tasked with the project has selected M/s Margo Network, a subsidiary of Zee Entertainment as the Digital Entertainment Service Provider (DESP) for providing Content on Demand (CoD) Service on trains and railway stations.

The ministry aims to generate more non-fare revenue with the new offering. 

The project will be implemented in two years and full roll out will be completed by 2022. Under the project, the content will be made available both in paid and unpaid formats for a contract period of 10 years which includes the first two years of implementation.

RailTel will provide various preloaded multilingual content such as movies, music videos, general entertainment and lifestyle in moving trains through media servers installed in trains.

The CoD platform will also provide various e-commerce and m-commerce services like travel bookings.

The earning from the project will be majorly through three streams - advertisement based monetization, subscription-based monetization and e-commerce/partnership services.

"With CoD, passengers will be able to enjoy uninterrupted free/Subscription based entertainment service and high-Quality buffer-free streaming across personal devices during their train journey. The content will be periodically refreshed," the Indian Railways said in a press release.

Talking about the project, RailTel CMD Puneet Chawla said that the full roll out will be completed by 2022. 

"The Content on Demand service will not only improve overall passenger experience but at the same time will increase the non-fare revenue through multiple monetization models," the ministry said. 

The service rollout will cover approximately 8731 trains which includes 3003 premium, express and mail (to and fro) and 2864 pairs of suburban trains. 

CoD will also be available at all Wi-Fi enabled railway stations. There are currently 5563 Wi-Fi enabled railway stations.