Uber famous journalist Arnab Goswami’s news channel Republic TV is scheduled to go live on 6th May along with its website republicworld.com. This news channel will be livestreamed on Star India’s digital platform Hotstar, making it the first Indian news channel to take this digital leap. At the moment, Hotstar has news content from global brands such as Fox News, Fox Business, and Sky News.
According to an internal memo circulated within Hotstar, the platform will go live with Republic TV on 6th May and will also have a ‘News’ page that will stream the live feed throughout the day, a strategy similar to that being adopted by Twitter. The livestream is meant to be supported by advertising. This ‘News’ category will be added to the existing portfolio of Hotstar’s popular TV shows, movies, and sports portfolio.
Arnab Goswami, who is the editor-in-chief and founder of Republic TV made a statement about the news channel being streamed on Hotstar. He said,
Hotstar is a compelling destination for content cutting across genres and age groups. We are confident of breaking the digital barrier and believe this is the first step as news produced in India goes digital and then global. We believe the coming together of these two exciting brands and services will take news to the 90 million-plus viewers on Hotstar every month. You can now catch Republic on the move and on demand.
Republic TV has currently tied up with direct-to-home (DTH) platform Tata Sky for distribution purposes and Microsoft India as its technology partner. Interestingly, Hotstar now also allows visitors to watch TV series on their website. This should ensure a wider (and younger too perhaps?) audience for all the programs streaming on the platform, including of course, Republic TV.
Uday Shankar, the chairman and chief executive at Star India stated that the launch of Republic on Hotstar will not only fill a gap in the platform’s portfolio but will also ensure that digitally savvy, young Indians who want to understand their country and the world will be able to benefit from being able to access news from anywhere and at anytime.
Since Goswami left Times Now, there has been a clash between the two parties, the most recent being the trademark fight over the popular phrase, ‘the nation wants to know’. Although the phrase was coined by Goswami, it is the opinion of several legal experts that the trademark belongs to the employer even if the same was coined by an employee. However in this case, both parties seem to have equal rights.
Republic TV’s response to being served with a notice for using ‘the nation wants to know’ was tweeting a poster of the news channel’s release which contained the tagline ‘the nation still wants to know,’ which was not only empowering but mocked Times Now for its futile and kiddish attempts at causing a skirmish with its previous employee.
Jokes aside, the country eagerly awaits the release of this news channel and with its availability on digital platform Hotstar anywhere and at anytime, it is sure to have several eager viewers and an audience like no Indian news channel has seen before.
