New Delhi: ZEE Digital has become the first media and entertainment business in the country to launch Progressive Web Apps (PWA) for 13 of its national and regional news brands covering 9 languages. This is the largest PWA launch in the country and possibly across the world. With this launch, ZEE Digital joins the league of global tech giants like Facebook, Twitter, Alibaba, Uber, LinkedIn etc that offer PWA on mobile to their users for a superior user experience on the web.
Now viewers of India’s top broadcast news brands like ZeeNews.com, Zee24Ghanta.com, ZeeHindustan.in, Zee24Kalak.in, 24Taas.com, ZeeRajastha.com, ZeeBiharJharkhand.com, ZeeUpUk.com, and ZeeMpCg.comshall benefit from the PWA experience on mobile web.Having already grown these brands by over 65% in monthly active users over the past year, the company is targeting a further 200% growth in organic traffic on the back of this launch.
The new mobile web app experience will help users to add their favourite news brand’s icon to their Home screen along with the option of hassle-free offline browsing to ensure quick and smooth page loading in poor network areas and works well even on mobile devices with low storage.
Rohit Chadda, CEO, ZEE Digital commented, “Being the largest media house in India, our focus is to reach as many people as possible. Progressive Web Apps or PWA as they are more commonly known standin between native apps and a website, enabling users to take advantage of the smooth and seamless experience of a native app while allowing the benefit of not taking any space on the device. Its a great technology because it loads faster and does not consume the phone’s memory. This becomes important for users in lower tier towns who may not have high end smartphones. The PWA shall help them overcome issues such as poor network connectivity and low device storage.”
Given ZEE Digital’s mobile first strategy, it was a natural progression for it to turn the mobile web experience for its leading broadcast brands into a PWA and offer seamless news consumption experience for users.
“With this new technology advancement, our page speed performance scores are now the best in the industry. Being in the broadcast space, Live TV and video are the most popular form of content consumed on these brands. Hence, the new PWA version of the platforms bring video to the forefront with a new ‘Watch’ section for users to directly view their favourite news channel live on the web. Being a lighter form of an app, the live TV experience is much better since load times of the video player are much faster than before. This has played a vital role in enhancing our user experience on mobile which accounts for almost 95% of our users on the web,” Chadda added.
Over the past year, ZEE Digital has launched multiple mobile apps for various brandslike ZEE Hindustan, ZEE Business, India.com and ZEE 24 Ghanta to build a robust and sticky user base on mobile. Earlier this year, India.com launched its new mobile site to provide a more immersive experience to users which resulted in tremendous growth for the brand in terms of monthly active users.
