Republic TV’s Exit Poll strategy for HD feed across OTT pays huge dividends

Republic TV, the No, 1 English news channel, has successfully translated its leadership on Broadcast to Digital by creating huge presence across all smartphones in the country through an extensive distribution across large OTT platforms, telco OTT apps and OEMs.

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. Republic Media Network has partnerships with several key 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 built the technology backend to provide its viewers a premium HD feed, with zero buffering time. Republic TV has also integrated a server side ad insertion capability, thereby offering advertisers the vehicle to reach these discerning viewers across devices.

The Republic TV Double Exit poll show that was aired on Nay 19, 2019 starting 4 pm set a new record in terms of traction and engagement, witnessing a dramatic spurt leading to 19.8 million watch minutes. By way of reference, during the Karnataka Election Exit Poll, the overall English news genre (which is a set 6 TV channels) together achieved 13.5 million watch minutes. Similarly, during Gujarat State Election Exit Poll, the total watch time of English news genre was 12.1 million minutes across BARC measured TV homes. These figures clearly indicate that the traction on Republic TVs OTT and digital platforms are growing exponentially alongside its huge success on traditional TV Broadcast segment.

The double exit poll on Republic TV also managed to engage a wider audience on social media. The hashtag #RepublicExitPoll recorded 221 million impressions, with 23.7K tweets within a few hours. This generated an immediate and widespread engagement on the digital space across 14 countries and 23 states in India, with the National Capital Region, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh recording deepest engagement. 

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“News and sports categories have been the driving force for video consumption across AVOD platforms. News is here and now and video news access across devices makes Republic TV the most accessible news brand. Our teams have worked hard on building capacity and technology to offer a native user experience with Ad Serving (SSID) capability. The demographic profile across our own platform is extremely young, with 60 per cent of the audience under the age of 35. We are extremely confident that this will build a yet another strong platform for advertisers to reach the younger, aware, informed and engaged audiences,” remarked Vikas Khanchandani, Group CEO, Republic Media Network.

Republic Media Network has focussed on the depth and variety in content by covering news from every nook and corner of the country backed by in-depth research. Republic Media Network conducted a first of its kind – a double exit poll with action-packed live analysis from CVoter and Jan Ki Baat. The content strategy, aimed at empowering the viewers with all the information and day to day updates about the elections. With its massive team of on-ground reporters, in-studio anchors, hi-end production, investigative reporting and impressive scale of coverage from across the country, Republic Network is committed that accurate and unbiased information flows to all the viewers thus bringing credibility and authenticity on the platter. 

(Source – BARC | NCCS 15+ | India
Source – Brightcove Analytics, Hotstar Analytics, YouTube Analytics and Frrole Insights. The above data does not include data from Jio TV)