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Tag: Venugopal Iyengar

  • Vidnet 2024: NexC: Distribution that pays off

    Vidnet 2024: NexC: Distribution that pays off

    Mumbai: The OTT business in India is buzzing with new streamers, niche, and language offerings. However, early players are struggling as heavy content spending isn’t matching revenues, and India-specific low pricing hasn’t spurred subscriptions. Growth has plateaued as consumers return to post-COVID normalcy, preferring to binge occasionally.

    Adding to the churn is the shift towards AVOD by giants like JioCinema, offering premium events like cricket for free, with Disney+Hotstar following suit. This has strained streaming bottom lines. The rise of FAST channels is also causing industry jitters. Vidnet explores the future of the streaming ecosystem. The Vidnet 2024 is being held on 19 July 2024, at Hotel Sahara Star, Mumbai.

    The fireside chat saw Indiantelevision.com group founder, chairman & editor-in-chief Anil NM Wanvari in conversation with Planetcast COO – digital Venugopal Iyengar.

    The fireside chat delved into the evolving landscape of distribution technology and the challenges faced by Planetcast in its 28-year journey of serving media customers. Venugopal Iyengar highlighted Planetcast’s mission to streamline content creation to delivery, emphasising the integration of software programming and AI in transforming processes and improving cost efficiency.

    “We have been in the business of distribution technology, serving media customers for 28 years,” said Iyengar. “Our goal is to pave the path from content creation to the endpoint where viewers watch it on their screens.”

    Iyengar introduced NexC, a unified platform that simplifies the distribution journey by offering a single access point for all necessary products and services. “NexC gives you a single point ingest and seamless access to all the products and services you need in your distribution journey,” he explained.

    Addressing challenges, Iyengar noted misconceptions about NexC being a monolithic product and concerns over transitioning to cloud solutions. “It’s not a monolith. You can enter through any one product and still be part of the platform,” he clarified. To ease cloud adoption, Planetcast offers hybrid solutions, combining on-prem and cloud services.

    Iyengar also discussed differences between Indian and global markets in cloud adoption and highlighted the significant impact of AI. “AI has been fabulous for us,” he said. “Applications like speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and scene-by-scene tagging are now seamless.”

    In conclusion, Iyengar emphasized the importance of embracing technological advancements to meet customer needs effectively. “We must acknowledge the benefits AI brings and continue to innovate in our approach to content distribution,” he stated.

  • Vidnet Summit 2024: How technology is driving the customer streaming experience

    Vidnet Summit 2024: How technology is driving the customer streaming experience

    Mumbai: The OTT business in India is buzzing with new streamers, niche, and language offerings. However, early players are struggling as heavy content spending isn’t matching revenues, and India-specific low pricing hasn’t spurred subscriptions. Growth has plateaued as consumers return to post-COVID normalcy, preferring to binge occasionally.

    Adding to the churn is the shift towards AVOD by giants like JioCinema, offering premium events like cricket for free, with Disney+Hotstar following suit. This has strained streaming bottom lines. The rise of FAST channels is also causing industry jitters. Vidnet explored the future of the streaming ecosystem.

    The session head for this panel was Publicis Groupe India managing partner & head of Publicis Commerce India Anshul Garg along with other panelists: travelxp CEO Tanay Chothani, Planetcast COO – Digital Venugopal Iyengar and Prime Focus Technologies senior VP, Sales & BD-APAC Anupam Sharma.

    Garg discussed technological advancements in the OTT industry, also opening the session to the panelist on how improvements in video streaming, such as high-definition video, low-latency streaming, and adaptive bitrate streaming, significantly enhance the quality and reliability of the customer streaming experience.

    Sharma noted the nature of localisation. He noted that language localisation enhances content accessibility, with AI playing a crucial role in text localisation while experiments continue for voice localisation.

    Chothani said the importance of delivering substantial value swiftly, is driven by decreasing customer attention spans and rapid innovation.

    Lastly, Iyengar highlighted the rapid advancements in viewer experience. He pointed out that platforms like Amazon are at the forefront, leveraging innovations such as multicam views and second-screen interactions to enhance viewer engagement.

  • Planetcast launches its NexC cloud-first architecture to enable media companies

    Planetcast launches its NexC cloud-first architecture to enable media companies

    Mumbai: Planetcast Media Services, a broadcast technology and media services provider, announced the launch of its NexC architecture to simplify content management, distribution, and monetisation services and technologies. NexC provides a single-window, content supply chain management system, enabling users to beat the complexity challenge of today’s media and entertainment landscape.

    Benefits of NexC include:

    •    Frictionless movement of content assets between most-used services increases efficiency and minimises cost.
    •    NexC’s collaboration tools mean that global teams can work together without leaving NexC
    •    The inclusion of major functionalities in one interface, including content supply chain, playout and distribution, FAST, OTT distribution, and post-production, enables Planetcast customers to effortlessly add services without complex processes or having to deal with multiple vendors.
    •    NexC’s cloud-based infrastructure and content-repurposing features enable users to monetise content quickly and cost-effectively across more formats and geographies than ever before.

    “Media organisations are finding it increasingly cumbersome and expensive to navigate the various stages of post-production, content delivery, and monetisation,” said Planetcast chief executive officer Sanjay Duda. “In addition to seeking to enhance profitability, many media & entertainment companies are expanding geographically, while at the same time targeting new distribution points and functionalities, such as over-the-top (OTT), Free Ad-Supported Streaming TV (FAST), and pop-up channels. This leads to an exponential increase in the requirement for media processing and management, which we call the ‘complexity challenge’. Planetcast’s NexC unified service layer architecture meets this challenge through its flexibility and cloud-first approach, enabling customers to maximize efficiency and cost-effectiveness.”

    The NexC architecture consists of the following elements, all accessed through Planetcast’s unified customer user interface (UI) and dashboard:

    •    Contido content supply chain and management solution
    •    Content Preparation & Localisation Services, a full suite of core technical post-production services from quality control and compliance to subtitling & dubbing, etc.
    •    Scheduling, Playout and distribution through the CloudX hybrid cloud playout and Recaster digital delivery
    •    Planetcast OTT, a white-labelled OTT solution for non-linear content distribution

    In addition, the NexC platform offers partner-integrated value-added services such as:

    •    FAST Playout with partner-driven Server-Side Ad-insertion, Ad-Demand Management and Platform partner management.
    •    Cloud-based Creative Post Production which includes the full suite of creative services such as Editing, Colour Grading, VFX, etc. on Cloud.

    “Planetcast’s success has been built upon the ability to adapt to changing distribution and monetisation trends over the last two decades while successfully handling some of the world’s most valuable sports and entertainment properties,” said Planetcast’s chief operating officer, digital, Venugopal Iyengar. “Our strength lies in having organically built end-to-end distribution value chains using our in-house software development capability, mostly built with our own IP, served by a 200+ software team. We believe that the ‘complexity challenge’ is the greatest issue facing media companies today. To meet this challenge, we have designed the NexC architecture from the ground up to provide all the power and functionality media companies need, combined with the simplicity of a single sign-on collaborative user interface.”

    Further, to ensure sustained value enhancement in this rapidly developing industry, NexC will offer API integration support for any Generative AI solutions that serve to enhance the workflows and functionality of the Platform.

    Planetcast has developed one of the industry’s most comprehensive cloud-driven media services offerings and is trusted by many of the world’s most demanding global media companies, including Amazon Prime Video, Discovery, Disney, Indian Premier League (IPL), Star TV, Sony, Viacom, and Doordarshan, India’s premier public broadcaster. These unique solutions are right now being integrated into the NexC unified service layer architecture.