ITV

Tag: Kawaljit Singh Bedi

  • NDTV records highest traffic for Indian website on Election results day

    NDTV records highest traffic for Indian website on Election results day

    On May 16, on the counting day of the LokSabha Elections, NDTV.com set a new record for the highest traffic on an Indian website, on a single day.

     

    NDTV registered over 13 billion hits in a single day, as per Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the leading cloud platform for media and content delivery to NDTV and almost all other media companies in the country.

     

    Speaking on this, Suparna Singh, Managing Editor and CEO, NDTV Convergence Limited said – “ndtv.com had committed to delivering the fastest results on air and online and we spent months gearing up for what we knew would be unprecedented traffic. Elections is in our DNA and we were determined to give Indian users a seamless, in-depth and complete experience.”

     

    Kawaljit Singh Bedi, Chief Technology Officer, NDTV Convergence, said, “We are committed to providing our viewers with real time information be it online or offline. For an event as big as the Election, it was important that our viewers had access to fast, real-time information. During the Election results, we received over 13 billion hits, the highest for any site on a single day in India, and we were able to provide exceptional site performance on web and mobile without any hindrance. This was possible with the support of Akamai as they absorbed 99% of our traffic on to the Akamai Intelligent Platform.”

     

    Sidharth Malik, Managing Director and Vice President, India, Akamai Technologies said “On May 16th, counting day for Indian elections, Indian News sites witnessed the highest ever internet traffic. NDTV partnered with Akamai on this day to provide reliable and scalable solutions to support this high traffic volume. We are happy to report that NDTV got over 13 billion hits across its digital properties that day, which is the highest ever traffic any Indian website has got on a single day.  We at Akamai technologies are very pleased to have played a part in providing NDTV with a scalable and robust infrastructure on such an important day for the company”

     

    NDTV also had new records being set for its digital properties including concurrent users hitting an all-time high of over 500,000 users as per Google Analytics. Some other single day statistics as per Google Analytics –

     

    · 11.6 million unique visitors across all platforms, the highest ever in a single day.

    · 117.7 million Pageviews across platforms, the highest single day ever

    · 19.6 million video streams with an average viewing time of about 9 minutes

    · Over 200000 concurrent users watching video on the website

     

    NDTV was also the number 1 app on iOS across all categories in India and the WAP site registered its all-time highest concurrent users further strengthening the group’s belief that India is going to be a Mobile first digital economy

  • #RaceTo272 with Twitter and NDTV’s Graphity

    #RaceTo272 with Twitter and NDTV’s Graphity

    MUMBAI: When it first created Graphity on the occasion of Republic Day, little did NDTV know that its service of sending personalized photographs and messages would create such a flutter on social media, especially Twitter.  

     

    On the counting day, 16 May, NDTV has decided to engage its propriety service Graphity on Twitter to tweet real-time results to people who use the hashtag #RaceTo272 from @NDTVElections. The tweet will have an info-graphic representing the latest party/alliance position at that moment.

     

    How does it work?

     

    A little over three months since its launch and NDTV’s platform already boasts a client list that reads: Rajinikanth, Jai Ho, the BJP, Hero and Star Vijay among others. Indeed, when Rajini finally decided to be a part of Twitter, his first few followers received autographed photographs of the southern legend, courtesy Graphity.

     

    While the popular trend has been for people and companies to turn to Graphity to attract users, more prominently on Twitter, the service is not restricted only to Twitter, and can operate for web and SMS as well. According to NDTV Convergence CTO Kawaljit Singh Bedi, “The technology is such that we can monitor any social media. But Twitter is the best medium to do it.”

     

    On Twitter, Graphity works on keywords and hash tags; it listens to them and sends out the desired outcome, as requested by the client or NDTV itself. A case in point is Star Vijay, which utilized the service for its show Super Singer where hash tags were tracked and personalized messages from finalists were sent for a week before the finale. “We wanted to be a brand that people follow. Super Singer is synonymous with Star Vijay so the conversation would revolve round us. This helped us deepen the bond and make it stronger,” says Star Vijay digital media strategist Paul Samji.

     

    NDTV first used Graphity for one of its own activities in January, post which, Twitter sat up and took notice and started routing people who required similar services to NDTV. It took four months to come up with the service and if anything, all that hard work is now bearing fruit. It takes one or at the most two days to form an idea of what the client wants. Using the content management system (CMS), users give controls to the software. Firstly, the ‘listener’ service listens to hash tags by connecting to Twitter and secondly, the listener application connects to the ‘pusher’ application. The response page then sends out the desired outcome that is modified to fit a web page as well as various operating systems.

     

    According to sources, rates for Graphity have ranged from Rs 3 lakh to Rs 18 lakh.

     

    The inspiration for Graphity came from BCCI’s photographs of Sachin Tendulkar bidding farewell to the cricketing world and his fans. After speaking to various companies, including some in the US, NDTV decided to do it alone. A team of four engineers helped set up Graphity. “We have built it like a platform. It suggests an inpoint and outpoint for sending commands to execute outcome. These can be text, image, video, information or a combination of any of these,” says Bedi. “There are two more brands we are working with. The requests are only increasing because brands see the value in Graphity.”

     

    Given Graphity’s growing popularity, it’s quite possible that in the near future, the service may evolve into more than just a branding exercise used by brands to get maximum exposure.