India News Stream Correspondent
Sep 2018
New Delhi:Editor ji, a completely new kind of video news platform for mobile phones, is now here to give you news content of your choice at a time of your liking.
A brainchild of journalist Vikram Chandra, the mobile phone app uses Artificial Intelligence(AI) for delivering customised newscasts in English and and Hindi, giving you completely new experience of news while on the go.
Chandra told reporters here that he plans to launch this app in more Indian languages in future. The app currently show over 100 video stories in a day. The number is said to increase with more content providers coming on board.
There are videos covering a wide range of areas like npolitics, international and national news, sports, business, lifestyle, technology and entertainment.
Chandra said the application was not based entirely on AI, and it uses a hybrid setup that involves AI and human intervention to ensure stories are credible on the platform.
“There is the need for a simple form factor that can be easily accessed by those who aren’t that familiar with technology. The number of Indians accessing video on the internet is expected to rise from 250 million to 500 million within 3 years. The new users may be handling smartphones for the first time, and hence need a simple, uncomplicated user interface designed for video news. This interface should also be capable of handling multiple languages because a lot of the growth will happen in vernacular languages,” said the company in a release.
The application can be downloaded free on Google and Apple app stores. The home screen gives you an option to personalise the content you want to see. Users can adjust the quantity of news from different categories. The app also gives the option to sift news from opinion.
Chandra said that today video news was facing multiple issues and a major example is the TV news which was facing challenges around its business model. Carriage fees and a complete reliance on TRP driven advertising was having an impact on the quality of content. The race for TRPs means that the news is often drowned by views and opinions, which can also lead to charges of bias.
”The same holds for Digital video and OTT, which more than 200 million people are consuming video online already. But the user experience isn’t really suitable for video news. It is one thing to search for individual clips if you want to watch a movie or an episode of a TV serial, but this is cumbersome if you quickly want to update yourself with 30-40 news stories of the day. As things stand digital news formats are tailored for text, not for video,” he said.
Moreover, he said, the social media was beset with the problem of rapid dissemination of fake news, and quality sources of video news content (and independent journalists) can find it difficult to get distribution for their reports, so they need an independent platform for video news that can supplement the existing media pipelines.
The editor ji platform tries to provide a solution to all these problems, Chandra said.