A new online portal called ESCAPE has been announced yesterday, it is a service by ESCAPE Axiata Sdn Bhd, a wholly owned subsidiary of Celcom Axiata Berhad. ESCAPE is an online entertainment portal created for Celcom’s 13 million subscribers to watch movies, TV Series, LiveTV and events streaming on their smartphone, tablet, laptop and PC.
[Dato’ Sri Ahmad Shabery Cheek, Minister of Communication and Multimedia Malaysia (centre) together with Dato’ Sri Jamaludin Ibrahim, Managing Director/President & Group Chief Executive Officer of Axiata Group Berhad (left) and Dato’ Sri Shazalli Ramly, Chief Executive Officer of Celcom Axiata Berhad]
International superstar, martial artist and movie industry veteran Jackie Chan was named as ESCAPE’s new brand ambassador.
Contents on ESCAPE is curated to include long and short-length formats, it will be available to Celcom Postpaid and Prepaid customers starting 1st September 2013.
Celcom customers can opt to register for Escape via Facebook or a valid Celcom mobile number at the ESCAPE website after which they will be requested to verify their registration via their Celcom mobile number and email account. Once registration is succesfull, users can immediately log on and enjoy the service.
Content on ESCAPE is available on individual rental or 30-day, all-access passes, two options named “Watch One” and “Watch All” respectively. Subscribers can pay for billable content via their Celcom postpaid or prepaid accounts or credit cards.
The pricing for ESCAPE was not revealed by Celcom, however MalaysianWireless understands that the 30 days all-access pass cost RM25/month while a 48 hours(Watch One) access rental pass per video cost RM9.
Celcom has yet to disclosed the number of contents on ESCAPE. At the point of writing, MalaysianWireless counted 156 movies and 2 series available on ESCAPE.
As all preferences and purchases are stored online, the “pause and play” feature gives subscribers the control of pausing content midway on one device to continue watching on a different device simply by logging back in.
As part of the launch starting September, subscribers under Celcom First will enjoy RM54 worth of movies and events on ESCAPE over three months simply by sending “ESCAPE” to 28882 via SMS. Prepaid customers on Xpax, U.O.X., S.O.X., and Celcom Frenz who register via the same steps will be able to enjoy RM6 worth of movies and events when they reload RM10 into their prepaid account, or a RM18 credit when they reload RM30. Both promotions are valid from now until 31 December 2013.
ESCAPE requires a minimum Internet connection of 1Mbps(LTE/3G/WiFi) to work. Each ESCAPE account has a limit of 5 devices.
The service is available for Android(2.3 & above) and iOS(iOS5.7 above) devices as a free downloadable app. On PC, users are requires to instal Microsoft Silverlight, supported browsers include any HTML5 browser, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Unfortunately, ESCAPE is not supported on Blackberry and Smart TVs. However Celcom said that it is working on making ESCAPE to work on SmartTVs in the future.
Celcom said that ESCAPE has signed partnership agreements with Malaysian entertainment producers for the purpose of producing local contents and obtaining rights for existing contents. The companies involved include Excellent Pictures, Global Station, idoTTV, KRU Studios, Skop Productions, Suhan Movies, and Tall Order Productions.
Some of the celebrities and producers who attended the launch of Celcom Escape include Dato’ Siti Nurhaliza, Datuk Yusuf Haslam, Norman Abdul Halim, Hans Issac, Syamsul, Adam Corrie, Redzuan Hashim, Rosyam Noor, and Ahmad Idham.
