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We speak to Sanjay Gupta, Chief Operating Officer of India's STAR TV, one of the world's largest media and entertainment companies with viewers in over 65 countries, including more than 168mn viewers in India alone.

Mr. Gupta discusses the significant business and consumer benefits that have been unlocked by moving Star TV's processes to the cloud, the technical challenges encountered along the way, and the role that mobile devices will play in the growth of India's cloud TV services.

As the first TV broadcaster in Asia to move TV content to the cloud, what have been your preliminary findings in this initiative?

The only question we have asked ourselves is why didn’t we do this earlier? The findings have been extremely positive and the overall response is overwhelming. We have redefined the way Indian broadcasters do business today.

Moving our business processes to the cloud has helped us unlock significant business value by allowing multiple teams to work concurrently. Similarly we have also unlocked consumer value by drastically reducing the time taken to reach multiple screens and territories.  

We did face initial hiccups with logistics and setting up the infrastructure. However, digitising our content delivery has helped us make immediate improvements in the way we access, improve, distribute and monetise our product.

What technical challenges have you encountered?

One of our biggest challenges was bringing together an extremely disaggregated content pipeline.

As a leading broadcaster we work with over 50 production and post production houses at any given point of time. Moving to the cloud meant we had to drastically change infrastructure across the entire eco-system.

This included upgrading the hardware of the existing systems, in some cases, replacing the entire system altogether, and making significant investments in fibre and bandwidth. We knew there would be resistance, and had to dedicate enough time to not only educate but also enable our partners.

Another challenge was around connectivity. India’s broadband & internet connectivity is extremely low - currently only a miniscule 0.1% of the population has access to broadband, and only 15-20% of those have a high speed connection. Uninterrupted connectivity, which was mission critical for us, took longer than anticipated as some locations had never been connected before!

Throughout the project we did workshop sessions with our internal teams and partners to manage transition without any disruption to our everyday business.

Has your addressable market been constrained by the bandwidth demands of cloud TV?

Our cloud TV offering is targeted at South Asians across the world. In India, bandwidth is certainly a challenge, but we are hopeful that this will improve dramatically in the future. Globally, we don’t see any constraints and in fact are quite bullish on the demand for such a service.

What OPEX gains do you hope to make from moving to the cloud?

While there were some initial increases in costs, especially in setting up the digital backbone for this project, the investments will give us significant capability to monetise content on new and emerging digital platforms and screens in the future. Also, we have been able to cut down on significant hidden costs that existed before, which is another saving for us.

How do you plan to ramp up the service?

Today we are able to move across regions and offer our content concurrently. Our ability to push out specific content, tailor-made for specific mediums has increased exponentially.

This not only allows us to meet the unique needs of our global customers, but also offers us new opportunities to monetise and service our advertising and sales clients. We plan to extend this to all regional and network channels over the next few years.

What role will mobile devices play in the growth of cloud TV services in India?

With over 600mn active connections, mobile is the most ubiquitous screen in India, and for many it will also be the first screen that they interact with. Apart from ensuring that audiences get access to mobile specific content, we also offer greater engagement and content through on-demand services.  

We are completely geared up to the challenge and have been successfully providing content to all mobile service providers in the various formats and bit rates. There are more than fifty formats that are created from a single show, available across all mobile platforms.

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