Tag: Regional news

ABP Network launches Telugu digital platform ‘ABP Desam’

Mumbai: ABP Network has forayed into the Andhra Pradesh and Telangana market with the launch of its new digital platform, ABP Desam. It is the eighth regional language digital portal from the house of ABP Network. With this new offering, the media conglomerate aims to strengthen its push for local storytelling and strive to create bigger strides in the sphere of regional news.

ABP Desam has positioned itself as a digital portal that completely mirrors the culture, ethos, and spirit of the Telugu people. Its tagline ‘Mana vartalu, mana oori bhashalo!’ which translates to ‘Our news, in our town’s language!’ conveys its objective to deliver news that is personalised to the individual and collective preferences of the Telugu readers, the media company said in a statement on Friday.

“Regional language is a very crucial growth driver for digital news platforms,” said ABP Network CEO Avinash Pandey. “Recently, we had launched a digital platform for Tamil audiences and now we are further strengthening our digital portfolio with ABP Desam. I’m confident that this Telugu news platform will provide access to high calibre, diverse digital news content to the people of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana and also bring a bevy of growth opportunities to our network.”

July 30, 2021
India Ahead’s Bhupendra Chaubey bets big on regional news

MUMBAI: Senior journalist and former main man of CNN News18, Bhupendra Chaubey is a very busy man. He is juggling the affairs of 12 editions of Telugu daily Andhra Prabha as well as running English news channel India Ahead. Since joining the national news channel as owner & co-promoter in June 2020, Chaubey has been leading its foray into the regional space.

At Indiantelevision.com’s News Television Awards 2020 Summit, co-powered by TVU Networks, Chaubey spoke at length about his vision for the company going forward. In a virtual fireside chat with Indiantelevision.com founder, CEO, and editor-in-chief Anil Wanvari, Chaubey revealed that the company is in process of doing a collaboration with a large scale broadcaster in Goa.

Chaubey further mentioned that in the course of a month the organisation will have a dedicated show about Goa news. He is aiming to reach audiences across India through digital campaigns and cross promotion on various other platforms. Said he: “I think it is the best time to re-imagine the media landscape and I am glad to say that our organisation is not backed by some big corporate entity, but we are still trying to do something different.”

The India Ahead editor-in-chief is looking to delve deeper into Indian states in terms of specific coverage. "We are picking stories from the areas which are not even heard of," he claimed.

Wanvari asked Chaubey why prime time shows are not tackling enough issues and giving adequate representation of what is happening in India. The senior reporter explained that over the last ten years, broadcasting platforms are operating on the credo that talk is cheap and content creation is expensive. “Over this period, talk shows started replacing the entire existence of TV news itself. There used to be debate shows during morning, afternoon and evening. At India Ahead we are attempting to focus on collaboration and not just metro cities. Every Indian state has regional media houses, so there is no dearth of news, but the only challenge is nobody has attempted to delve deep into regional stories.”

Chaubey pointed out that contrary to the popular view propped up by rating organisations and marketing agencies, regional news fetches better ratings. According to him, at the end it’s the consumer who is benefited the most. When it comes to India Ahead, the news is dedicated to southern states every day from 1 pm to 5 pm. Later in the evening, the channel telecasts a show called People’s Editor, which again caters to different parts of the country.

The 2020 edition of the event will culminate with the grand News Television Awards, which will honour the best performers in the Indian news television space across more than 40 categories. The results will be declared virtually on 6 November 2020.

October 29, 2020
ZEE5 starts streaming TV9 news channels on its platform

MUMBAI: ZEE5 has recently added news network TV9 to its rich roster of regional news channels giving consumers option to choose from various languages available. TV9 is now going to be available on the ZEE5 platform to bring to viewers daily updates via their flagship channels TV9 Telugu, TV9 Kannada, TV9 Marathi, TV9 Gujarati, TV9 Bharatvarsh, and News 9.

ZEE5’s understands the pulse of the Indian audiences and the initiatives for the regional audiences have added to the platform’s appeal. The integration of TV9 on the platform is a result of the platform’s endeavours to provide more real-time and detailed information to regional audiences. The audiences across the country can now comfortably access verified news in their preferred language. At a time when getting real-time and verified data is a necessity for India, ZEE5 and TV9 together provide a destination where you are guaranteed of getting all the relevant data you need to know in real-time.

ZEE5 is the largest producer of regional content in India, with a bouquet of offerings in the regional library across multiple genres and formats. ZEE5 is continuously adding to and reinventing the platform to curate more content at regular timelines. This partnership is another step in ZEE5’s journey to truly become India’s Entertainment Super-App by further expanding the platform’s ever-expanding regional reach.

May 18, 2020
Regional news’ online viewership is billion-plus every month: Vidooly

MUMBAI: News genre is emerging in popularity across leading online video platforms in India and crossing a billion-plus online viewership every month.

Vidooly Media Tech conducted a study across top Facebook pages from India and YouTube channels from India, two of the most popular video platforms to understand viewership habits of Indian internet users.

Vidooly CEO Subrat Kar says: “Interestingly, we are seeing a rising trend of regional content dominating English or ‘Hinglish’ content. This points to the larger overall trend of increasing viewership and internet growth in non-urban areas. This presents an exciting opportunity for brands and content creators to create multilingual content to reach out to the millions of users to are accessing internet for the first time.”

The study was conducted across a total of 16 categories of Indian video content in the genres of automobile, comedy, kids, education, entertainment, film and animation, science and technology, health, gaming, how-to and style, food, music, news and politics, people, pets and animals, sports and travel.

With over 180 million users on YouTube and 241 million users on Facebook in India, they are the two of the most popular online video platforms in India. Both the platforms with its massive reach and ubiquity allow content creators, brands and anyone to reach millions of viewers who consume this content across desktop and mobile devices.

YouTube findings (across top 10 channels)

Music genre with 3.2 billion views and entertainment genre with 2.7 billion views attracted maximum Indian viewership. Video content targeted towards kids especially nursery rhymes were also extremely popular with 1.4 billion views.

Regional news is extremely popular on YouTube with nine out of the top 10 news channels publishing news in regional languages. Collectively, the top 10 news channels pulled in 701 million views. Most other viewed videos were across the categories of comedy, film and animation and food.

Facebook findings (across top 10 pages)

Unlike YouTube, news pips other genres to emerge the most popular category with Indian viewers with the top 10 pages pulling in collectively 1.4 billion in viewership. Here, the top spots are taken by Hindi and Marathi news channels. Followed closely are entertainment videos with 919 million views across the top 10 Facebook pages. In entertainment category, regional content again takes the top spot with content in Tamil, Kannada, Telugu and Hindi being extremely popular with viewers.

Regional trends

Across Facebook and YouTube, regional news across the languages of Telugu, Hindi, Tamil, Kannada and Marathi are extremely popular with Indian viewers collectively amassing 2.1 billion views in August across YouTube and Facebook.

Overall rankings

Across the top 100 channels in India on YouTube, content around music entertainment, news and kids’ genres took the top spots.

Across the top 100 Facebook pages, the top seven spots are dominated by news channels, followed by cooking and entertainment genres.

October 2, 2017