How NDTV used Visual Analytics to increase viewer 'stickiness' in the historic Lok Sabha Elections

Elections in India are really huge and election campaigns are conducted more like a festival.
Given the massive interest of the general public in tracking minute-by-minute updates of elections, Indian media leaves no stone unturned to cover Indian elections. From candidates to canvassing,
election rallies to voting, exit and opinion polls and live coverage of election results to government foundation and beyond, Indian elections in many ways define Indian media.

The Lok Sabha Elections of 2014 were expected to be historic and they turned out to be larger in scale than ever before. All news channels and news websites were gearing up for over a year preparing to put on a show to rival anything anyone else had ever put together on Indian television. It was in this backdrop that NDTV’s technical team researched and found a product for presentation of election analysis in a way that probably changed the way Indian television channels presented election-related data.

THE BUSINESS CASE
NDTV’s technical team met with all possible vendors who had innovative solutions that the company could use to stand out in the news market on an important day where the whole nation was clued on to television. After going through multiple options, NDTV selected a combination of a Stype Kit camera tracking system and VizRt’s virtual studio.
VISUAL REPRESENTATION CREATES HUGE IMPACT
NDTV’s team believed that presenting data alone would not appeal to viewers. The team believed that the data or information must be presented in a form that was consumable by the audience. Accordingly, a team of designers worked with the team of developers to create a solution that would impress the discerning viewers.

The focus of NDTV’s graphics team was to create a package for coverage of election results that would make NDTV’s data analysis approachable, usable, understandable and sensible for the common viewers without cutting down on content and presentation. Many weeks of experimentation ensured that on the day of counting of votes, graphics shown by the firm stood out from every other news channel.

HOW IT WORKS
The Stype Kit works by mapping the area of a studio within the limits of a computer’s graphics scene. The connected Stype Kit would send tilt, pan, zoom data in real time to the VizRT graphics engine which would automatically and instantly adjust the internal camera in the scene to pro-ers worked with the team of developers to create a solution that would impress the discerning viewers.

With these initiatives, NDTV was able to increase viewer ‘stickiness’ throughout the day during the counting of Lok Sabha elections of 2014. Further, it also strengthened NDTV’s position as one of India’s most technology-savvy organizations.