Inshorts: Delivering hyperlocal videos to India's most remote regions with Google Maps Platform

From northern Rajasthan's desert communities to southern Kashmir's mountain villages, Indian's most remote regions are continuing to make strides in coming online. The subcontinent is projected to add 300-400 million Internet users by 2025 to reach a total of 1 billion (in a nation of 1.3 billion).

Online news aggregator Inshorts is on a mission to empower people in these areas with accurate and relevant information that enables them to stay informed and up-to-date with the latest happenings. Inshorts launched in 2013 as a mobile news aggregator for busy urbanites that condenses news into 60 words or less. Identifying different needs in the countryside, the platform launched Public, a hyperlocal video platform that enables users to share community updates directly and in real-time, in 2019.

The Public video platform addresses several unmet information needs in remote regions. India’s media is dominated by Hindi and English, languages many rural people do not typically use. Mainstream outlets mainly cover news that has little or no bearing on local community life. And, many rural inhabitants prefer to access local information by video rather than text.

To succeed in its Public mission, Inshorts needed versatile mapping tools to accurately define relevant zones of interest, enable easy tagging of those zones on the video platform, and allow users to enter location information in their own language. By turning to Google Maps Platform, the startup found the solutions it needed to enable news sharing in India's soaring online media market.

"We've been inspired to see how India's remotest areas are coming online, and we want to contribute to the journey of empowerment by enabling relevant content exchange wherever people are," says Manish Bisht, Head of Technology, Inshorts. "Our success depends on mapping hyperlocal zones, and Google Maps Platform enables us to define those boundaries."

Keeping 10 million people updated on their local area

The Inshorts team launched Public on a hunch that people will engage more, the more local the news gets. So Inshorts deployed the Geocoding API to research location data from its users. The data convinced the team that modelling the Public video platform around hyperlocal video feeds was the right strategy moving forward. The decision paid off when Public garnered 10 million users within six months of the launch.

"Going from zero to 10 million users in six months was proof-of-concept that we had tapped into a deep craving in India's regions for relevant local information," says Manish. "And we simply wouldn't have been able to target consumers at this hyperlocal level without Google Maps Platform features such as the Geocoding API."

After experiencing the rapid growth of Public, the Inshorts team began working with partner Searce to help them determine how to best scale with Google Maps Platform. Searce helped Inshorts migrate from a pricing plan that carried API usage limits to a post pay model that scales to fit customer needs with no cap on services.

The change required Inshorts to migrate all existing maps deployment from existing projects to new projects without interrupting service on the Public video platform, and Searce made that possible, says Manish.

"Our partner Searce helped us move to the Google Maps Platform business plan that made sense for our scaling needs, and it was done seamlessly without interrupting services.” says Manish. “Now we have a scalable Maps solution where we don't have to worry about budget or reaching an API usage limit."

Keeping content relevant and local with Reverse Geocoding

According to Manish, the confirmation that restricted zones yield superior engagement led to a second significant insight enabled by Google Maps Platform. A narrow zone does not necessarily mean a smaller one.

In the capital Delhi, "local news" might be defined by one's neighborhood or even one's block, as nearly 10,000 people are packed into one square kilometer. In the remote tehsil (township) of Mauranipur in Uttar Pradesh – which stretches over more than 1,000 sq. kilometers – a news story that happens a three-hour drive away might well be about your uncle or your cousin. Population density is key to determining what's meant by local news.

This is what makes Reverse Geocoding API so valuable in the Public video platform's architecture, says Manish. When Public ingests scattered location coordinates from users in its system, Reverse Geocoding translates that data into the names of zones in India's administrative hierarchy. That enables Inshorts to carve out precise zones of interest according to user preference, be that at state, district or township level.

"What Reverse Geocoding lets us do is to say, this incident happened 500 kilometers away but it's still within the township the user entered in their settings," says Manish. "That means it's relevant local content to send to their feed."

There's a third major advantage Public gained through the combination of Geocoding and Reverse Geocoding. In times of emergency, Manish says, Public is able to send crucial public service messages to exactly where they're needed, using Google Maps Platform features to define precise boundaries at all levels.

This became important when local authorities sent curfew announcements during the COVID-19 crisis, says Manish. Public was able to transmit such information to communities at the very border of affected zones.

Connecting local languages to power digital media transformation

Say a series of robberies has erupted in an Indian township. It's important for people in the community to obtain information about the exact location of the break-ins and methods used. The Public video platform enables people to search videos about the incidents in their own language, and local influencers to tag video updates in the local tongue.

Place Autocomplete enables both of these features by supporting languages across the subcontinent. Google Maps Platform allows new users to express location preferences in their preferred language, and enables (obligatory) content tagging even at township level in dozens of local languages. "Everybody can start typing in their own language with Place Autocomplete," says Manish.

The power of Place Autocomplete, however, goes beyond being able to search for relevant videos, he adds. As part of the Google Maps Platform ecosystem, Place Autocomplete can then plug into Geocoding API and Geolocation API to enable users to find the exact location (be it a road intersection or warehouse cluster) where the burglaries took place.

"Without a solution that can ingest location information in dozens of local languages we'd be at a loss," says Manish. "That's where Google Maps Platform comes in with its language agnostic Places Autocomplete feature that lets everybody tag videos in their own language, and translates everything into geocodes and addresses so people can track down the scene of a crime."

Now Inshorts is planning to take the Public vision of empowerment beyond India's borders, testing its hyperlocal videos model in two new markets. It sees Google Maps Platform as an essential partner in the journey.

"Our ambition is to grow this platform internationally, so we can connect more people in isolated areas to the power of information," says Manish. "Google Maps Platform is a critical driver of this mission by enabling us to find people at a hyperlocal level and deliver the videos that count for them."