IT Firms Increase Focus on India's Media

Technology vendors are raring to offer products and services targeted at India's media and entertainment companies

By Swati Prasad

The media and entertainment (M&E) industry is one of the fastest-growing industries in the country. However, as the digital space shrouds the media environment, existing marketing agenda and capabilities of M&E companies need to be retooled.

This poses a huge opportunity for the IT industry and companies including IBM, Cisco Systems, HCL Technologies and Oracle, are cashing in by unveiling new offerings for the Indian media sector.

With the emergence of new technologies ranging from interactive television, blogs, Internet Protocol television (IPTV), social networking sites, e-polls and mobile TV, media houses are compelled to look beyond one-way communication.

"Most of the M&E companies are working toward providing consumers with an interactive experience instead of one-way communication," Chandan Mendiratta, vice president of service provider and system engineering at Cisco India and SAARC, said in an e-mail interview.

M&E companies are also looking to enhance operational efficiencies.

"In India, media houses are increasingly adopting IT to improve efficiencies and streamline operations in the light of their expansion plans," Surya Bhardwaj, Oracle's vice president of India applications, said in an e-mail. Amar Ujala, the country's fourth largest daily newspaper group, recently implemented Oracle ERP applications to speed up deployments of its new print locations.

Platform-neutral content rules

Convergence is also driving the need for better content.

"The same news article can be read on the computer, the mobile phone and in the newspaper so media companies can't afford to go wrong with the content," Madhusudan Gupta, senior research analyst at Gartner, told ZDNet Asia in a phone interview.

In India, wired Internet household penetration has increased to 7.1 percent and readers have started moving online, forcing the publishing industry to change rapidly.

"Worldwide, the Internet has replaced newspaper as the most preferred media in terms of gathering news and background information. And India is no different," Karan Puri, HCL's senior vice president and global vertical head of telecom, media and entertainment, said in an email.

According to Puri, print media today faces a whole host of challenges such as creating platform-neutral content to tackle convergence issues, real-time mapping of reading habits and preferences to enable the delivery of personalized information, lack of standardization across devices and channels, and the massive amount of newspaper archives that needs to be digitalized.

"Major newspaper organizations in India have evolved from being print-centric to having a more diversified portfolio, including Web, mobile, television and radio," Puri said.

But, Gupta believes that print media still has a future in India. "The market dynamics in India are very different from those in the developed world," Gupta said. "With a low newspaper and Internet penetration, newspapers won't go away in haste."

According to a recent report by KPMG, only 23 or 24 percent of the country's population reads a newspaper. It predicts the local print media will grow at 9 percent to generate annual revenues of some US$7.7 billion by 2013.

"But, with newer technologies, even if print does not die, its business model will have to go through a major transition," Kanwaldeep S. Kalsi, IBM's India and South Asia general manager of media and entertainment, said in an e-mail.

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