MUMBAI: India’s No1 English news channel Republic TV made astounding impact with its Elections reportage on 23rd May witnessing a dramatic spurt leading to 122 Million watch minutes on its digital live stream. The watchtimeon digital streaming has crossed the TV viewership on the counting days of Gujarat and Karnataka Election combined. By way of reference, during the Karnataka Election Counting day, the overall English news genre (which is a set 6 TV channels) together achieved 65million watch minutes. Similarly, during Gujarat State Election Counting day the total watch time of English news genre was 45 million minutes across BARC measured TV homes. These figures clearly indicate that the traction on Republic TVs HD OTT is growing exponentially alongside its huge success on traditional TV Broadcast segment.
Republic TV started the Election reporting at 6AM and remained ahead in presenting the vote count updates. The extensive network of on-ground reporters at every counting station tracked the trends and sentiments and reported the same in real time. On the counting day Republic TV’s HD OTT became a preferred destination for viewers to get accurate election updates in real time, any time – anywhere, which resulted in receiving 967.21million requests on CDN with an average of 15.91 Gbps of data consumed across the globe, as reported by Limelight Networks.
Figure 1 Source – Limelight Networks
The top Tier I and II cities like Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, Gurgaon notched the traffic and recorded deepest engagement on Republic TV’s digital platform. Being the most important and largest event of the year, 2019 Loksabha Elections was the talking point not only in the home country, but it also triggered conversation beyond the borders. Republic TV’s digital platform recorded its biggest global audience mainly from USA, UAE, Australia and Canada. The demographic profile of the audiences is young with 60% being under the age of 35.
Global Geo Spread: Source – Limelight Networks
Ashwin Rao, Director, India at Limelight Networks said, "Millions of viewers in India and around the world tuned into Republic TV for the much anticipated 2019 Lok Sabha Elections results. While the traffic spikes were expected, Republic TV successfully managed to provide a seamless and a broadcast quality experience on millions of connected devices to their India and global customer base. As a long time CDN and video delivery partner, Limelight Networks was honoured for the opportunity to support this event for Republic TV. We will continue to scale and innovate on our journey with Republic TV and keep providing high quality services to their online audience”.
Arnab Goswami, Managing Director & Editor in Chief of Republic Media Network said, “News is instantaneous and video news access across devices makes Republic TV the most accessible news brand. Video consumptions have sky-rocketed during the Election season and Republic TV clearly emerges a leader amongst its fellow publishers. My team has worked tirelessly to ensure that we not only have a platform that is user-friendly and delivers news at lightning-fast speeds but also that we're able to reach out to as many curious minds as possible by extending our presence by partnering with the major OTT players of the country. With 60% of our audience being below the age of 35, we are extremely confident that we will start a wave of knowledge that will attract more such inquisitive minds and provoke them to think”.
In terms of its expansion, the channel has capitalised the growing consumption of news video across mobile devices which has propelled it to reach out to a wider audience that can consume content on the go. The LIVE HD feed of Republic TV is available on several OTT platforms like - Hotstar, Jio TV, Zee5, SonyLIV, Vodafone Play, OLAPlay, Mi TV, Samsung My Galaxy, PayTm, YouTube and JustDial thereby having the capability for delivering rich content to a vast audience. Republic TV has been always ahead in terms of technological innovation to provide its viewers a premium HD feed, with zero buffering time. It has also integrated a server-side ad insertion capability thereby offering advertisers the vehicle to reach these discerning viewers across devices.
