Dive into Unicast Entertainment

Launched in May last year, digital platform Unicast Entertainment gives access to insightful information from various professional niches through interviews and discussions. Roar interviewed Co-founder and President Rishit Jain to learn more. 

Rishit, a Second Year Economics student at Cambridge, shared he used to be an active member of multiple societies at his university. However, he felt a strong decrease in people’s engagement with those after the outbreak of Covid-19. It became harder to coordinate meetings and to organise events. He said societies were working at their “bear minimum”. He wanted a change, and this desire inspired him to try to create a network where university societies across the globe would connect and help each other. What he also wanted was to give students access to insightful information regarding various industrial areas. And he wanted to have everything in one place. Thus, Unicast Entertainment launched in May 2020, a few months after the pandemic had hit the entire world.

“For the past 7 months we have had around 580 000 impressions in total across our social media platforms,” Rishit shares proudly. “There has been huge interest, and we are extremely happy and thankful to our partners for helping us to build this community,” he goes on.

Unicast has partnered with multiple societies from different universities, including one of the UK’s biggest TEDx’es – TEDx Bath, the International Relations Society in University of Toronto and KCLSU project X. Other partners include Bright Network and Wall Street Oasis. Rishit shares they hope for further expansion as this would allow for more networking between societies and the potential of reaching to many other professionals from different industries.

Events and discussions

The main ways through which Unicast operates is the conduction of interviews. After gathering data from their partnering societies on students’ interests and the potential questions they may have, Unicast’s team interviews professionals from the areas of interest. As they have a diverse audience, they strive for having people from diverse backgrounds as well, which is why they engage in discussions with professionals from the sphere of Finance, Consultancy, Arts, Health and more. All of those interviews may be found on Unicast’s Youtube channel and are accessible to everyone. 

They further organise virtual events where a more limited number of students have the opportunity to engage in 1 to 1 20-minute long discussions with specific speakers. Registration for those usually opens a few weeks before the event and is done through Unicast’s LinkedIn page.

Their online interviews and “rapid networking events” feature speakers from well-recognised companies, such as global leaders in financial services JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley, well-known consultancy companies like McKinsey & Company, L.E.K. and many other. Past events have featured highly qualified and well-recognised speakers, such as Chief Global Strategist at JP Morgan Dr. David Kelly, CEO and Co-founder of Pymetrics Dr. Frida Polli and ‘Most Senior Woman at KPMG UK’ Melanie Richards.

Unicast is currently not live streaming any of their “rapid networking events”, but are considering creating bigger events, hosted on Discord, where students would be allowed to ask their questions directly. 

“Our strength lies in providing student societies with high-quality content for free. I feel like this is going to be beneficial for societies even in a post-Covid world. You want to have a social media brand that can assure that even if you’re organising an event that is not located anywhere near your university, you will still have an active audience. It’s not only about building an audience in your university, it’s about building a brand that people actually recognise,” Rishit concludes. 

As of January 2021, Roar and Unicast are official partners.