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BBC Hindi Chases Mobile Web Market

Serving Pages as Images Reaches More Users

The BBC Hindi Mobile website, as rendered without Unicode support and in its image-based version.
BBC World Service is working to bring its Hindi-language service to more listeners by targeting the near-ubiquitous mobile phone.

There are some 700 million mobile telephone subscribers in India, but not every phone is capable of displaying Hindi text, so BBC Hindi now serves two versions of its mobile website: m.bbchindi.com is a traditional site sized for WAP browsers and m.bbchindi.com/images. The images version of the mobile site converts each paragraph of text into a mobile-optimized picture, eliminating the need for a font-based means for displaying the Devanagari script.

Audio programs and news summaries are also available through both versions of the site.

The BBC World Agenda blog has more details about BBC Hindi’s mobile strategy.

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