Nautanki.TV Facebook to show live poll results

Nautanki.TV, Facebook to show live poll results

Will provide live video contents of general elections results using live video feed from Zee News

Pankaj Maru

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

MUMBAI, INDIA: As the great Indian political battle is nearing its climax, almost all media houses are all set to 'catch it live'. And this time, the online medium is a major player in this ballot battle. The latest to join this bandwagon is Nautanki.TV, an online entertainment broadcast platform.

Nautanki has tied up with Facebook to provide live feed about elections results on both portals. With this arrangement, now users of Nautanki.TV and Facebook can view live election results coverage broadcast from Zee News. The live feed will be available to users for three days, starting from morning of 16 May till 19 evening.

While speaking to CyberMedia News, Sunil Nair, CEO and founder of Nautanki.TV Networks Pvt Ltd, said, “The whole idea behind this new innovative concept came to my mind about 15 days back. And since then, we have been busy talking to Facebook and Zee News and working hard to integrate different technology platforms.”

According to Nair, the uniqueness of Nautanki.TV compared to other online entertainment broadcast platform such as YouTube is that here the user can view or watch a series of video content as per choice and not just a single video.

“Also, the users can use the API (application programming interface) platform or the widgets to embed the player and watch their favorite video content or TV programs on to their websites and blogs, which allows to view or watch the video content directly on those sites,” explained Nair.

Technically, Nautanki.TV works on the same lines used by TV channels to offer its feed to DTH (direct-to-home) providers that allows the content to reach to large audiences. “We have replicated more or less the same platform to re-distribute the video contents from TV channels to users, who want to watch content on the Internet,” added Nair.

While, commenting on Facebook’s recent integration of Indian languages on its site, Nair said, “It’s really good to help people, who are not comfortable with English language. Also it’s a landmark event to have coverage of India’s democratic process available on social networking site, and we expect that more and more people will share and comment on the democratic process.”

He said three teams from Nautanki, Facebook and Zee News are working hard to integrate different platforms and testing the live feed available on the sites.

Interestingly, Nair pointed it would be for the second time in the world that election coverage live feed will be made available on the Internet. The US presidential elections also had a similar coverage. “If CNN can do it, why can’t our small team of 29 people do it? It’s a credit to Zee News and Facebook for their great support,” Nair remarked.

Presently about 26 different TV channels are linked with Nautanki.TV that provide video contents, which are distributed and viewed by users across 13,000 websites and blogs across world. “I think convergence of content and medium is the future of tomorrow,” Nair concluded.

Nautanki.TV is India's first online TV channel and it is a cusp of Internet and TV, that takes content from channels (shows, videos movies) and features it online. It generates over 38 million original videos to over 6 million viewers daily with over 25 broadcasters, 300 content creators in eight languages. Over 13,000 webpages have Nautanki.TV video player embedded on their websites.

It is the only Indian company to have open source APIs which allows large portals to pull content directly from its servers and serve it to their audience.

Nautanki.TV also has four self-produced in-house channels that feature short films, Indie music, animation theater, reviews and shows in various regional languages.

According to the Yankee group U.S entertainment survey 2008, 82 per cent of Internet video viewers watch TV shows online. Over 100 million videos are watched in India everyday.

©CyberMedia News