Microsoft Event: "Gaming doesn't really exist in India", Ambani tells Nadella

At the Microsoft Event Ambani agreed that in India, gaming could be one of the next big things. He pointed out that Jio's gaming venture in India. At the Future Decoded event in Mumbai Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella held a fireside chat. The two discussed different topics comprising gaming, startups, and data consumption growth in India.

Ambani agreed that gaming could be one of the next big things in India. He pointed out that Jio's gaming foray in the country. Jio last year introduced Jio TV set-top-box that also supports online gaming. It also supports all significant controllers and is said to deliver "zero-latency" gaming. Jio had then announced its partnership with Microsoft and Tencent for its gaming projects.

Ambai told Nadella "Gaming doesn't really exist in India," at the event. He pointed out that the faster broadband speeds and cloud adoption can accelerate this segment further, referring to Project XCloud, Microsoft's cloud-based gaming initiative.

"For many of us who don't know what gaming is, it is tough to imagine, but gaming will be bigger than music, movies and tv shows put together," Ambani stated.

Earlier, Ambani praised about Nadella's leadership skills. He said that the US President Donald Trump will see a new India from what Carter or Clinton saw during their visits to India. "I think that as we are speaking, President Trump has arrived in Ahmedabad, and the, India, that he will see in 2020 is very different from the India that either President Carter saw or Clinton saw when he came in ..... or even Obama," he said.

He also said that India's telecom networks are on par with the global standards. Ambani also stressed on India's meteoric rise in data adoption and consumption after Jio launch.

"Pre-Jio, users had 256 Kbps speeds which we called broadband… post-Jio, up to 21Mbps speed is available to all users in India," he said, emphasising a huge data prices drop.

"The pre-Jio price of data in this country was between 300 and 500 hundred rupees. And for the poorest of poor people who use 2g the prices as high as 10,000 rupees," Ambani said adding, "Post Jio the price is between 12 and 14 rupees a GB. And usage. And a lot of, like, what Jio has achieved in the last three years, is (38 crore people) 380 million customers have migrated to this 4g technology."

We all know that Microsoft and Reliance Jio are cloud partners. According to the partnership, Jio uses the Microsoft Azure cloud platform to develop cloud solutions dedicated to Indian enterprises. Jio also announced setting up data centres across India while Microsoft said it would organise its Azure platform in these data centres. Jio will set up data centres across India, comprising of next-generation compute, storage and networking capabilities, and Microsoft will arrange its Azure platform in these data centres to support Jio.