Ramki Sankaranarayanan, Founder & CEO, Prime Focus Technologies, gives a low-down on the digital media landscape in India.

How do you see the Indian Media & Entertainment (M&E) industry changing with the onslaught of digital? The digital media landscape in India is at an inflection point. Increased penetration of smartphones coupled with emergence of new media channels are driving exponential growth in audio-video content streaming. Additionally, the roll-out of 4G has led to an increased demand for OTT (over-the-top) content. All these factors are changing the way digital content is being delivered across multiple platforms to consumers on the move. According to the FICCI-KPMG 2015 report, the industry is expected to reach Rs 2260 billion by 2020, at 14.3% CAGR. However, many M&E players are ill-equipped to face the new realities of this digital era, as they continue to use legacy technology and traditional means of content management. When it comes to digital content, consumers are spoilt for choice. How do M&E players evolve and stay relevant? As consumers have access to a wide range of on-demand digital content across multiple platforms, businesses are struggling to capture their attention. M&E players are increasingly shifting away from a business-to-business (B2B) approach to adopt a business-to-consumer (B2C) approach. Building a connected enterprise is key to managing the business of content in a digital era. M&E companies need ONE enterprise-wide software not just to manage content-led business activities across departments and geographies, but also to deal with the challenges of big data. Be it to ensure revenue growth or expansion in margins, Media Asset Management (MAM) systems cannot function in isolation anymore as TCO has to come down in the industry from where it is today. Cloud computing, security and big data are gaining momentum. What is the current state of adoption and what are the challenges being faced on these fronts? SMACS (Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud & Security) has revolutionized M&E business operations by enabling scalability, as well as boosting agility and consumer reach. SMACS can help content owners monetize digital content by enabling them to target the right audiences and achieve faster time-to-market. However, while content has gone digital, many key players continue to perform operations on legacy systems, thereby creating Islands of Automation. A cloud empowered, virtualized environment can eliminate these silos and enable seamless collaboration between internal and external stakeholders while facilitating effective content supply chain management. Additionally, recent film content leaks have put the spotlight on security concerns around digital content. Hybrid Cloud architecture addresses these security concerns, providing a solution where IP content can be stored and accessed locally while applications are hosted on the cloud. What are the latest innovations at Prime Focus Technologies (PFT)? What are the highlights of PFT’s future roadmap? PFT offers customers transformational solutions that help virtualize the content supply chain and digitally mediate enterprise workflows to manage not just content, but the business of content. To further our goal of assisting M&E enterprises to drive creative enablement, enhance efficiencies, reduce cost and realize new monetization opportunities, we have recently added brand new features and power packed modules to our flagship Media ERP Suite, CLEAR. These include the following: * Live Sports on Hotstar: Prime Focus Technologies is helping Hotstar get sports viewers as close to the Olympics action as possible with every single minute captured through live feeds and Video on Demand (VoD). PFT’s proprietary software Story Teller is helping Hotstar create more than 120+ VoD segments every day. Story Teller as a tool allows to create videos within a minute of the live action ending, helping deliver interestingly packaged videos to digital consumers. The hourly VoD segments are complemented with an end of the day highlights segment that is edited and packaged manually by the PFT team. PFT has helped Hotstar live stream and create VoDs for the recently concluded Pro Kabaddi League as well as IPL 2016, amongst other live sports. * DAX® Production Cloud: An upgrade to the industry standard DAX® Digital Asset Management, DAX® Production Cloud allows users to deploy ONE software for both dailies and post servicing workflows. This means, stakeholders in the production supply chain – on-set, editorial, VFX (pull downs), marketing (trailers), localization vendors, distribution (screeners) – all collaborate on the same software. * Promo Operations Module: A module of CLEAR Broadcast Cloud which offers a never before functionality to automate the entire promo operations workflow. It provides end-to-end process orchestration for promo creation through delivery, including automation of promo versioning and rendering using Adobe Premiere Pro CC. * Optimizer for Amazon Web Services: Part of CLEAR Operations Cloud, this newly added feature allows content owners to quickly repurpose content for distribution to web, mobile, VoD & IPTV platforms in a cost-efficient manner. It deploys a clever algorithm to optimally use a mix of reserved, on-demand and spot instances on Amazon Web Services to meet the Service Level Agreement (SLA) at the lowest cost. * Compliance Data Model enhances the compliance-led content preparation process. Users will no longer be required to catalog assets multiple times for the same compliance parameter across various profiles. PFT remains committed to advancing the technological capabilities of the M&E industry to meet the growing demands of consumers to have content delivered the way they want, when they want, on whatever platform or device they want.