New Delhi, Aug 23 (IANS): After 36 years of being in the news business, the Indo-Asian News Service (IANS) has taken the lead yet again by becoming the provider of the first daily news capsule to be streamed on an OTT platform.
The capsule went live on Tuesday on ALTBalaji, the subscription-based video-on-demand platform wholly owned by Balaji Telefilms Ltd.
Making this announcement, Sandeep Bamzai, Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, IANS, explained the philosophy driving the move that no other Indian news agency has made thus far.
He said: "At IANS, we believe in following the path of least resistance that allows us to leverage our news skill sets efficiently. We decided to launch news capsules on OTT so that we explore a brand new platform to provide high quality news content."
This, Bamzai added, is "the new arrow from our quiver to provide the full digital news bouquet to both our subscribers and the growing universe of OTT viewers".
The news capsules -- 35 in a day -- will span national politics, international affairs, business and economy, sports, science and technology, and entertainment. These are the core strength areas of the IANS newswire, which rolls out more than 600 news stories, features, analyses and backgrounders covering these verticals in English and Hindi daily.
In parallel, IANS subscribers, too, will be able to access content from the IANS TV feed on the newswire's website, www.ians.in. That will be an additional video feed, which became available from August 22 on the newswire.
For IANS, the OTT venture marks a new stage in the newswire's evolution, whose audio-visual presence in the digital space was previously limited to two YouTube channels -- IANS TV, with 1.2 million (and counting!) subscribers around the world, as well as Bollywood Country, which is hugely popular among followers of entertainment news.
The IANS digital footprint also extends across the newswire's subscribers-only website in English and Hindi, ranked by Alexa as No. 2 among Indian news agencies, and its open websites: IANS Photo, IANS Video, IANS Live, Bollywood Country, Khabar Filmy and Cricket Fanatic.
The newswire, which owes its origin to the 'India Abroad' newsweekly launched in New York in 1986, also has an active presence on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.