NTV Kenya live online streaming review and NTV website revamp
NTV Kenya has officially joined the ranks of leading Kenyan television channels which are currently streaming live. You can now catch NTV on their official website www.ntv.co.ke/live/ which has incidentally been overhauled to spot a totally different look.
However, I am going to dedicate this post to the things you need to know about the new live stream and more on some facts you don’t need to know but I will let you know anyway. The channel has started advertising their new stream service with vigor this past week during their live TV programming and I can’t be blamed for getting a little curious.
I went in and turned the site upside down and came out with some interesting observations which I will presently share with you. Previously, the NTV website only contained clips of their news bulletins with a programme guide and a couple advertisements but now, it is a whole new deal going on there.
Other channels like Citizen TV online and KTN TV online had already begun streaming live a while ago and they have been getting neat reviews ever since. NTV is the latest channel to initiate live stream and they have done so by revamping the entire website at the same time to have a more engaging and friendlier website.
Things are getting really sticky there. Of course, once you are on the website, you will be required to press the ‘live’ tab first in order to initiate the stream. This is assuming you went straight to the home page, which by the way has a slightly annoying feature, in my own opinion, where a YouTube clip starts playing without being prompted. What’s up with that NTV?
That does not spoil the party much in the sum total of things though. The stream itself is powered by YouTube and has some user friendly advantages compared to other platforms such as livestream and Ustream.
Clarity of the stream
The clarity of the stream you use will be dependent on the speed of the connection you are on. On a slow connection, you will get 360p of video quality which is not too whacky but you can get better quality when you switch to auto. Again to modify these settings hover your cursor over the YouTube tab and you will be sorted.
Live stream buffering ability
To watch the buffered content on a slow network, just press the refresh button (where the play button is usually located)
Ability to buffer makes streaming on a slow network pleasurable. You get to watch content in a smooth display with a few minutes compensation away from the real-time stream.
On a really slow internet connection, it is not really seamless since the buffered stream sometimes skips a couple of seconds ahead, at times repeatedly, and eventually becoming uncoordinated.
Anyone on a fast bandwidth (Read 500 Kbps and above) should be able to stream without any glitch. To watch the buffered content on a slow network, just press the refresh button (where the play button is usually located) and voila.
I was able to watch the ‘Third Annual Leadership Congress’ on my PC using a 3G Safaricom connection and the experience was ecstatic. However, it was not so pleasurable on my Orange modem which offers slower speeds (Since I am not covered by Orange’s 3G at my current location) but it was fairly watchable.
When your stream is buffered, the red light on the ‘Live’ tab located at the bottom of the YouTube window goes off, but when your stream is actually live it lights up. You can jump to the latest stream from the buffered content by pressing the tab ‘live.’
NTV Faces
NTV Faces by NTV.co.ke
A unique addition to the website is NTV Faces, which contains information about the popular news anchors of the channel. This is a working idea though since there are actually only five personalities from NTV who are showcased at the moment.
An interesting point to note is that many of the news anchors and reporters are not featured and those featured don’t have a common agenda since some share their personal information (which is good and more relevant to the whole plot) while others tell us little we don’t already know.
For instance, Watson Karuma and Jamila Mohamed get really up close and personal to their fans while Smriti Vidyarthi tells us about her previous duties in NTV (largely reflecting the image of her as a TV personality we already know) while Nimrod Taabu is probably not aware that his image and link to twitter have been uploaded on the site since there’s nothing about him there. But as I mentioned earlier, just like Swahili Hub, there are amazing working ideas going on there.
Nation Media Group has really taken their online presence a notch higher and it has been proven by the inception of Swahiili Hub and online streaming of NTV. Most of NTV and QTV content are also featured in Swahili Hub. Of course in addition to these, there are the online versions of their print products such as Daily Nation, Business Daily and Daily Monitor which are already flying high.
NTV’s official website is not necessarily as popular as its other affiliates but with more reason to visit the site now given its live stream, its world Alexa rank of 201, 077 could climb higher in a matter of weeks. But that is my own working theory. We shall have to wait and see.
