KOLKATA: With the rise of premium content in India, content creators, studios, production houses are embracing new age technology. US based video technology company Streambox is eyeing this emerging need with its innovative solutions. While it has customers in the broadcast sector, Streambox is expanding to provide solutions for film and post-production, shared CEO and co-founder Bob Hildeman.
The company is excited about its prospects in India, which is probably the largest content creation market, in terms of volume if not revenue, mentioned Hildeman. The market is well-known for Bollywood film production, episodic commercial broadcast production that throw up many opportunities.
“We have been providing cloud services in India for many years on AWS but most of the users have been non-Indian firms. And we can hopefully change that with the growth of Indian companies using a cloud service. Recently, we have released a software product called Streambox Spectra. It is a virtual encoder that works with our cloud. It provides Indian customers pure software into end workflow. And I know that Indian customers, as well as customers around the globe, appreciate the software-based solutions, ” he said.
Until now, the North American market, especially the US, has been the main avenue of growth for the company. Many film studios, streaming platforms like Netflix are headquartered in the US. But even if we look at Netflix’s content offering, more Indian and Korean shows and films are dropping every day. Multilanguage content is driving that type of adaptation, he added. Hence, India is in a great position to continue to evolve and create content using newer technology, he noted.
Large post production companies in the US that work globally have been using Streambox for over ten years. They are strategic partners for the company as it develops ideas on how to make a better product to address the market needs, Hildeman explained further.
“One of their use cases was using a Streambox chroma 4k, encoder-decoder to provide remote car grading for homes to a producer in LA. From Toronto, Canada, to LA – that is a long distance, and it needs technology where we compress high quality 4k video with Dolby Vision to be able to stream that out at around 80-100 megabits which is available globally. So, we call our technology internet friendly. And that means anyone with you know robust internet connection, can use our product for delivering remote production services,” he detailed.
With the ongoing work from home trend, Streambox is being gradually adopted in other markets too. Other key markets include UK, Central Europe along with a growing customer base in Japan, Korea.
The company has just started out its journey in the Indian market. It has Sanjeev Kr Sinha as country sales manager for India & SEA, who is in talks with many premium customers.
“We see the Indian market as a primary market where we can utilise our software to essentially provide every Indian production company ways to use software-based solutions to do remote grading, remote production. With a cloud presence in India on AWS, it provides a very robust high-performance service that Indian companies could utilize immediately,” noted Hildeman.
Currently, Streambox is projecting a demand from US, Europe, UK based customer base that carries production work in India. “One of the opportunities can be we move ahead and set up an Indian operation for those customers as they expand and utilise India based production houses, and of course, the workforce and solution providers. And for them to work remotely, Streambox is a must have for them to do remote, high-quality video streaming from those locations, out to the UK, the US, North America, and so forth. So, I think the timing is critical that we step ahead and provide some direction to our customers outside India, as well as customers inside India,” he stated.
However, bringing hardware to India is no cake-walk. Hence, Hildeman advised that having Spectra, virtual encoding solution, and cloud-based workflow with software-based music players is the ideal type of software solution for Indian customers to start to deploy.
“We have travelled to India many times. We have customers in India, in the broadcast sector, and now we are expanding to provide solutions for film and post-production. I believe that the Indian market is very robust. There are highly talented creative, technical people for us to provide the tools so they could do their work better, faster and more efficiently. We are looking forward to the relationship that we build with our customer base,” he signed off.
