Smartphone is becoming the main choice of media consumption in India and while the Smartphones are becoming very affordable, spending on data is very calculated. When people plan their data spend, they look at optimizing the data wisely. It’s where Opera Max comes into picture. Opera Max is a data-management and data-saving app for Android phones which can save data drastically as much as 50%. Opera Max is the first app in the world to optimize the video and music streaming apps and save the data. A month ago, the company had optimized the Opera Max for video saving for YouTube and Netflix apps, the latest update to the apps takes care of the music streaming apps. Initially it works for six music apps that are Pandora, Slacker Radio, Gaana, Saavn, Mix Radio and YouTube Music, with more apps to be supported in the future. According to a recent study conducted by market research firm JuxtSmartMandate, streaming and listening music online is the third most preferred activity of urban Internet users in the country and it mentions 97.4 million people in urban areas listen to music online. With increasing adoption of Smartphones, this numbers are only going to increase but the music streaming apps also take a heavy toll on the data. “More and more people love listening to their favorite music with apps; however, these apps are among the major data hogs consuming users’ mobile data quickly,” says Sergey Lossev, Product Manager at Opera Software. “Now, we have added audio compression for these music apps so that people will feel free to stream music without having to look constantly for available, free Wi-Fi coverage. This is particularly helpful for users with limited data plans.” Opera Max uses Rocker Optimizer technology for the data compression of the streaming audio without the loss of audio quality. It supports both MP3 and MP4 formats and for better efficiency it can also convert the audio into AAC+ codec, thus delivering high audio quality over a low bitrate connection to any compatible device. Recently we have seen some of the Mobile companies using Opera Max technology by default in their devices to help users save data. Xiaomi’s MIUI 7 uses Opera Max baked inside for data compression and we also noted recently that Samsung’s new feature in Galaxy J2 is powered by Opera Max. Opera Max optimizes data both on mobile networks as well as on Wi-Fi. Apart from video and music streaming apps, it can compress and save data when you are browsing and also most other apps including popular apps like Instragram, where you access more images. Users can monitor the data spend both on mobile internet or Wi-Fi on a monthly or daily basis and control their usage accordingly. ]]>
