ITV

Tag: mobiles

  • India tops global Instagram installs in October: Report

    India tops global Instagram installs in October: Report

    Mumbai: India has topped the charts in recording the largest number of installs of social media application – Instagram, according to the latest report by Sensor Tower. As many as 39 per cent of the total app downloads were from India, followed by Brazil at six per cent.

    The social media app was the second most downloaded non-gaming app worldwide, while the short video platform Tik Tok remained at the top with more than 57 million installs for October 2021.

    The countries with the largest number of installs were from Douyin in China at 17 per cent, followed by the US at 11 per cent, reports Sensor Tower. The app was, however, banned in India by the government, along with 58 other mobile applications which were developed by Chinese firms on account of national security.

    Apart from Tik Tok and Instagram, other apps including Facebook, WhatsApp, and Telegram rounded out the top five most installed non-gaming apps worldwide for the month as per the data.

  • Guest Column: The comeback of full-service agencies in India

    Guest Column: The comeback of full-service agencies in India

    By 2020, we will be close to a billion digitised screens. With the advent of cheaper data and smartphones and by virtue of tech giants such as Google, Facebook and Amazon entering the grassroots of India, digitisation has become inevitable. And it’s going to be mobile plus digitised television (OTT) that’s going to drive most of the scale.

    If digital is where maximum content is going to be consumed, surpassing Dish/Cable TV in most geographies, then brands will slowly and steadily move towards exploring digital in a much-evolved fashion and at a large scale. This means media and creative agencies will have to rethink their game plan, which has not changed much in the past two to three decades. Many questions arise, such as will mainline agencies reverse integrate their creative and media thinking to digital? Will digital agencies be able to manage the scale and responsibilities of managing multi-million-dollar campaigns? Will there be a need of creative and media standardisation? How many agencies will a client want to deal with to achieve the end objective? Who will win the rat race? And the list goes on, as we start thinking about how agency life will be when digitisation takes over completely.

    In my view, consolidation to make a full-service agency that gives solutions across screens plus creative and media is going to be the future. To date, most agencies are not fully prepared to manage this new world of ‘non-line,’ that is not just online or only offline but both together, as the lines are starting to fade. Mainline and digital agencies are poles apart in creative as well as media thinking but both are eventually chasing one goal. And that’s where the need of a full-service agency is, which creates and advertises one campaign with one objective across multiple platforms and formats. Not to ignore the fact that advertising bodies will also play an equal role in the entire standardisation process. And, sooner or later, it’s a self-evolving cycle that we will all get into, like the one mentioned below-

    1)  Consumers will become more and more digitised; thus, brands will want to get them through digital mediums across mobiles, TVs, PCs, tablets, and even hoardings

    2)   One master creative created in various sizes and formats will start to be the new norm with a fair bit of shoulder content for digital

    3)   And then planning will get more standardised across various mediums and consolidate into one form

    4)   KPIs will become more standardised as well to judge campaign effectiveness against various brand objectives

    5)   Possibly, there will be one tool that agency networks will create and connect to plan and buy across in a truly ‘non-line’ fashion

    This model of a full-service agency exists in mature markets such as the US, Japan, Singapore and will soon be a reality in India as well. Such a model increases planning and operational efficiencies and also ensures standardisation, right from planning to execution to industry benchmarking.

    It’s about time large agency networks wake up to the reality of a full-service model or soon a challenger start-up that is nimble to take such decisions will start changing the name of the game!

    The author is VP operations & media – West & South, WATConsult. The views expressed are personal and Indiantelevision.com may not subscribe to them.

  • We are seeing consumption in languages & low-connectivity areas, says Facebook India’s Saurabh Doshi

    With millennials increasingly consuming video online and on their handsets on Youtube and on VOD services, Facebook, the world’s largest social media network, has also rushed in to provide users with their unique experience. And while it has been a little late getting to the party with video, the Mark Zuckerburg led firm has been pretty clear about its intentions to own this space as well.

    With more than two billion monthly active users, and 100 million daily  actives, Facebook could cause unimaginable disruption with its video strategy.  While that might happen online on some connected devices, in India it is going to be on mobile, thanks to its vast mobile population of close to a billion.

    Facebook India head-media partnerships Saurabh Doshi echoed that sentiment as well at indiantelevsion.com’s OTT summit VIDNET 2017 in Mumbai two weeks ago. He stated that almost 95 per cent of the Indian population logs on to the social media network on their mobiles. He was on stage having a fireside chat with well-known Youtube creator and comedian Saurabh Pant.  Excerpts from the conversation.

    Can you quickly start with what is currently happening in India and what is the trend going on on Facebook?

    We get over 184 million active users monthly out of which 178 million come from mobile phones, so almost 95 per cent of the population in India is using Facebook on their mobile. Close to 100 million visit the platform everyday. On Whatsapp, we have around 200 million monthly active users.

    The interesting thing is that Facebook also deals with multiple formats, considering use of videos. As a creator myself, I have noticed that it has exploded over the last year and seeing far more traction. So can you tell us something about the multiple formats and how best to use them.

    We started with being a text platform. Over a period of time, the journey moved to photos after which we saw a big consumer shift happening towards videos like the Ice bucket challenge kicked off its whole journey on Facebook. So it is generally from videos to live, 360 degree, and VR which is an extension of different platforms. Recently, we launched camera effects through which the creators can create filters, masks, emoji’s.

    With Instagram, what’s happening is like put up the story and you get an immediate click on it.

    Yes, Instagram is also doing great in India, its growing relatively very fast, we see a lot of youth coming on the platform. Around 200 million people across the globe are using Instagram stories.

    At a session here, Republic TV’s Arnab Goswami gave Facebook a very happy endorsement where he said he prefers Facebook over Twitter because of a lack of anonymity. What is your take on that?

    Real people on the platform have always been our USP. When you have real people and real conversations happening on real time basis, it has been carried to other platforms as well. We have a community business team across the world working 24X7 to pull out fake pages and accounts.

    As I said Facebook videos have exploded from last year, my Facebook and Youtube views are almost even and sometimes views on Facebook were far more. So is there any trend you are noticing with regards to content creation and what works and what does not, from a video point of view?

    First of all I want to elaborate a bit. Facebook started up being a friend and family network and is still that. In fact, that is the core DNA. Secondly, there is need to either have a conversation as to what is happening in your personal life and also what is happening in your surroundings like breaking news or a movie trailer etc. – the ability to give an environment where anyone can comment, chat, share.

    I have been using Facebook Live very  consistently over a period of six to eight months and I have noticed that some of the live videos hit higher numbers than the stand-up. The new Facebook layout has a separate tab for videos, where you can see videos all across the platform.

    At various points of time we keep on experimenting with lots of products, the behaviour of a user to pull out a phone, watch some videos, and look at some text. People come to the platform not only because of the news feed but also a place where the creators’ content can be curated so that people can follow those creatives.

    What kind of content do you like to watch on Facebook: is there any particular channel or creative that you find exciting? Going forward, what do you think are some of the trends you see with regards to Facebook videos?

    Personally, I am a strong consumer of news, I discover all my news through Facebook, as Satya (Raghavan fro YouTube) mentioned, we see a growth around the languages, regional content and local content. So we focus on supporting creators and organisations in some of those areas. People with low-end devices in poor connectivity areas also browse Facebook. We are seeing the consumption all across and thanks to Reliance Jio for all the efforts on the infrastructure side.

    The most crucial question, what are the plans for monetisation rollout?

    We clearly understand the need for providing the tool through which creators can make money. Premium content obviously kicks in a lot of resources, efforts. We need to have the model where the creators should be able to make money out of Facebook. Having said that, we have experimented in the past, and there are more experiments going on. Last year, we rolled out suggested  video, this year some time early in US we rolled out ad rates inside the videos where the creator could actually put an ad and make money out of it including live.

  • Radiation norms non-compliant mobiles can no longer be sold in India

    NEW DELHI: The government, which had introduced stringent mobile radiation norms from 1 September last year, has now said in new norms that non-complaint phone makers will not be permitted to operate in India.

     

    Companies manufacturing or importing mobile phones for sale in India will have to ensure that the handsets are compliant with new norms. In the EMF (Electromagnetic Frequency) Radiation Standards issued last year, mobiles to be manufactured from 1 September 2012 were to have one tenth of the radiation levels compared to the then mobiles.

    The government had also said at that time that the mobile handsets with existing designs which were compliant with 2.0 W/kg averaged over 10 gram of human tissue would continue to co-exist up to 31 August 2013. Thereafter, only the mobile handsets with revised SAR value of 1.6 W/kg would be permitted to be manufactured or imported in India.

     

    It is expected that this may also help in curbing illegal imports and help Indian manufacturers such as Micromax, Karbonn, Lava and Spice to avoid pricing pressure in the market since they will not compete with lesser known rivals.

     

    Under the new rule put in place by the Communication and Information Technology Ministry, the exposure of radiation emitted from a mobile phone over a gram of human tissue should not be more than 1.6 watt if a consumer uses it for six minutes.

     

    All companies will have to display radiation emitted from mobile phones on the handset in terms of SAR (specific absorption rate) unit. According to a Department of Telecom official, no fresh stock of non-compliant mobile phones will be allowed to be sold from 1 September.

     

    Bureau of India Standards is also working on certain norms which are expected to provide clause for seizure of non-compliant handsets, the official said. These guidelines made India one of the select few countries in the world to have stringent, established in the interest of public health, for mobile towers and mobile handsets. Indian standards are now 10 times more stringent than more than 90 per cent countries in the world.

     

    Furthermore, the Manufacturer‘s mobile handset booklet will contain safety precautions. All cell phone handsets sold in the market in India will comply with relevant standards and shall be available in hands free mode.

     

    A scientific study in India-specific context is being undertaken jointly by the Department of Telecom and Department of Science and Technology in collaboration with the Indian Council for Medical Research, the Ministry of Environment and Forests, and the Science & Technology Ministry to derive norms based on credible scientific evidence taking into account diversity of Indian social context.

     

    While guidelines for consumers on mobile handset usage have been issued and placed on the DoT Web site (http://www.gov.dot.in), they include keeping distance – Holding the cell phone away from the body to the extent possible; using a headset (wired or Bluetooth) to keep the handset away from and not pressing against the head, and limiting the length of mobile calls and using text.

     

    Radio Frequency (RF) energy is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source – being very close increases energy absorption much more. Other precautions include putting the cell phone on speaker mode and not carry a mobile phone that is close to the chest or pants pocket. When a mobile phone is switched-on, it automatically transmits at high power every one or two minutes to check (poll) the network.