With a large and established LiveU fleet, ANI was able to provide high-quality, real-time election coverage from around India to national and global broadcasters.
Asian News International (ANI) is South Asia’s leading multimedia news agency with over 100 bureaus in India, South Asia and in major cities around the globe. The agency has been a longstanding LiveU customer for over a decade, scaling up its national and global fleet with a mix of LU800 and LU600 units together with the LU-Smart smartphone apps.
As an essential part of ANI’s newsgathering strategy, LiveU played a pivotal role in ANI’s live coverage of the 2024 Indian Election nationwide.
The election process in India is long and the groundwork starts months before. ANI sought to leverage its extensive network to ensure the most comprehensive election coverage. Its goal was to deliver the best possible content in a timely fashion, including political rallies, interviews and breaking news. Despite the nature of India’s terrain, such as poor connectivity in remote areas, and dramatic weather changes, ANI was confident in LiveU’s reliability and the speedy deployment of assets.
ANI has LiveU units all around the country so was able to send out crews as quickly as possible to central and remote locations, covering election news everywhere. The ANI crew was already familiar with LiveU and could set up the equipment easily. The full fleet of portable units was used, including LiveU’s multi-cam LU800 units for press conferences. Video was transmitted to the headquarters, produced there and syndicated in real-time to leading broadcasters in India and globally, on both their linear and digital platforms.
Key benefits included LiveU’s durability, mobility, reliability even in low bandwidth areas, and local support in partnership with Lamhas, LiveU’s longstanding partner in India. LiveU could also be used in difficult environments, for example where ANI had to go live for hours on end.
High-quality election coverage was viewed all around India and internationally with ANI knowing how to use LiveU the best way it can. Hundreds of hours of video were produced using LiveU equipment with live feeds from multiple locations. The news teams succeeded in covering everything from the political rallies to breaking news, even in challenging conditions. Following the election, ANI continues to use LiveU widely, such as covering the US Election, with its content being used worldwide.
"Our mantra is to be the first with the news and LiveU plays a crucial part in helping us to achieve this. LiveU has become an extension of our camera team, as critical as the camera units themselves, transmitting live video to our headquarters in New Delhi. We have been scaling up for over a decade and we've grown with LiveU, expediting our business with amazing content. During the election, we used LiveU extensively to cover the political rallies, breaking news on the election trail, the candidates and more with our live feeds used by broadcasters all over the world. Our units are now being actively used to cover the US election and other key events – in our business, the news never stops."
Ishaan Prakash, Director, ANI
