KOLKATA: Bharti Airtel’s aggressive $500-million bid to grab digital media rights of the Indian Premier League ( IPL ) cricket tournament signals the market leader’s intent to take on 4G newcomer Reliance Jio Infocomm on the content and digital services front, industry experts said.“Bharti’s bid was surprising and shows its approach towards accessing content has changed post Jio’s launch,” Bank of America Merrill Lynch said in a note seen by ET. Jio had bid $475 million for IPL digital rights.Rajiv Sharma, director and telecoms analyst at HSBC, said Airtel’s move suggested that mobile operators would now start to invest in digital content. He expects big telcos to be more serious about content “once the market has consolidated and 4G penetration exceeds 40%, which may be 12 months away”.Sharma said Airtel’s willingness to match Jio in the race for digital content “may help it benefit from any sector consolidation in the medium term”.Compared with Jio’s diversified content strategy, Airtel’s initiatives on the over-the-top (OTT) front were so far largely focused on sprucing up its music streaming app Wynk. The bid for the IPL property reflects a huge step up in its content play.A leading industry executive said Airtel is clearly looking to monetise content in addition to access services to emerge as a full-fledged digital services provider, especially in response to Jio’s aggressive approach towards acquiring content.“Revenue growth from access services, typically, tends to plateau and eventually drops after a particular level of penetration, which is why telcos the world over are increasingly looking at content and digital services to prise open new revenue streams,” the executive said. Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio did not reply to ET’s emailed queries as of press time Tuesday.An analyst at a global brokerage noted that Jio is the only telco whose over-the-top (OTT) offerings — JioTV and JioCinema — were among the top 10 video streaming apps in terms of monthly usage during the January-June 2017 period.With Jio’s content a major selling point for the low-cost 4G VoLTE feature phone launched by Reliance Industries, Airtel has no choice but to make a strong content play for what could be crucial for customer attraction and stickiness, experts said.But it could have its pitfalls as well.BankAm-Merrill Lynch suggested Bharti’s aggressive approach towards content acquisition could “add incremental risks of higher content payments in future, which could pressurise its balance sheet”.An analyst at a foreign brokerage said Airtel’s IPL bid could be a one-off as this property was about exclusivity and could be easier to monetise compared with generic digital content, which is difficult to make money off in a market like India.The analyst, who declined to be named, said there is no established business model in India for monetising digital content, which is seldom exclusive, and rampant piracy only made matters more challenging.