Citizen TV live Streaming and its twin online strategy
Citizen TV officially started streaming live a while back and in keeping with its exploding popularity in Kenya, it eased its way into the internet causing quite a stir among Kenya’s main TV services.
The website shouts modesty in appearance and offers support for live streaming via smartphones and tablets. Live TV is still watchable on slow internet connections at the expense of clarity.
You can now catch all your favorite news and programmes from Citizen TV at their official website or simply engage directly at www.citizentv.co.ke/live. For those who’d rather access the stream through your search engine, it should appear among the top hits when you search for Citizen TV for instance.
My experience of streaming Citizen TV over the past few weeks has been an experience to cherish, not because I don’t own a TV set but because it shows how fast times are changing with internet activity ever increasing in Kenya. (Please refer to Increased Internet activity in Kenya yet No Online TV streaming)
The channel can also be accessed through other sources in the internet such as on live stream , YouTube and Openbook. Citizen TV’s Alexa Ranking at the point of going to press is 270, 561 and is picking up at an amazing speed with exponentially high growth in traffic daily.
As opposed to other channels such as KTN online and NTV live stream, Citizen TV does not* post advertisements on their website, which actually makes their site more dedicated and less cluttered. Apart from a few additional clips from past programmes and the day’s programme lineup, the streaming page is actually dedicated to doing just that.
It should however be pointed out quite clearly that Citizen TV has two different sites working parallel to each other. There is Citizennews.co.ke and CitizenTV.co.ke. I’m sure you might be wondering how the whole system works but your guess is as good as mine. I think it is closely related to leveraging on online presence and that is as much as I can say coming out of my reserves of educated guesses.
Citizen TV’s “Hangouts”
You can interact with Citizen TV crew by following the “Hangout” link
Since this post is about the streaming of the channel, I am of course going to still refer primarily to CitizenTV.co.ke. There are Social Media plug-ins on the site, which have more or less become a must for users of Web 2.0 and above in the modern internet world. Of greater prominence though is Citizen TV’s “Hangouts” which is the last tab to your top right hand side of the page that redirects to Google+ where you can interact with those behind the company.
Live streaming on mobile phones
The website shouts modesty in appearance but exudes such class in terms of execution of the brand that is Citizen TV to maintain the feel that is created by their usual TV self. There is also a choice panel just above the live video feed that allows you to select the device you are accessing the stream on; like a BlackBerry/ Andriod device and iPad/iPhone. Being sensitive of the quality of the service provided cannot be defined in any other way.
The quality of the picture contained in the stream is nevertheless an issue that has to make the difference between regular TV and accessing it through the internet. I found it pixelated with no way of altering the quality of the stream since you only have the volume interface and another interface for switching between full screen and normal viewing mode.
The footer of the site is where the rest of ‘all of what you were wondering went to’ is located. Here is where you will find all the specialized content such as local, regional and International news, Business, Sports and features. This is also where you will find the rest of the links to other websites developed for other Royal Media Group products. Everything here opens in a new tab as opposed to the body of the website itself which executes every click to a link on the same page.
