Election Nautanki

Nautanki.tv is our very own home grown cross between YouTube and Hulu. Of course, the similarity is more with Hulu than YouTube, since the web site features content from TV channels such as shows, videos, movies, etc. and features it online. Its repertoire has over 38 million videos from 25 broadcasters (TV channels), 300 content creators in 8 languages.

The web site also uses open source APIs to be able to stream content to other web sites. So, web sites can have the Nautanki widget and embed video on their web pages. During the election results, however, Nautanki took the online broadcasting platform to a whole new level with an ambitious plan to broadcast Indian elections live over the internet. The content was sourced from Zee News and featured three days of continuous live coverage (in Hindi).

The stream reached 5 million Indians across the globe on Facebook.com and through other web sites that had Nautanki embedded. By the end of the whole shindig, more than 8,000 comments were recorded, and hours of election streams were consumed. The microsite elections.nautanki.tv now shows the corny HitchHikers’ message “So Long and Thanks for all the fish...” since the stream is now closed, but you can still go through the comments.

This confluence between Facebook and Nautanki is somewhat of a breakthrough since it represents an integration between the two platforms and even Facebook’s aggressive eye on the Indian markets – very recently, it added support for six Indian languages. Teams from all three entities worked on the seamless integration of the platforms and possibly this will mark a new paradigm shift between how video is streamed over the internet, especially in the Indian context. Zee News provided the content, Facebook leveraged its interactivity, while Nautanki provided the hosting and video platform.

Comments on the microsite were integrated into the Facebook news feeds and pulled to a user’s homepage, profile and friends’ news feeds. It seems there are over 100 million videos watched in India everyday, and with this new approach and collaboration with social media, the number is bound to go up.