The UK-based British Telecom’s media unit, BT Media and Broadcast, has ambitious plans in the Indian broadcasting space.
NEW DELHI: The UK-based British Telecom’s media unit, BT Media and Broadcast, has ambitious plans in the Indian broadcasting space.
In an exclusive interview with DNA Money, Deepakjit Chatrath, general manager client management, BT Media & Broadcast, Asia-Pacific & Middle-East, said that the company was in talks with prominent television groups, direct-to-home (DTH) players and even mobile TV service providers for striking partnerships.
BT Media and Broadcast is not keen on owning any media platforms or TV channels. Nor is it interested in holding any equity in the media or mobile phone companies. Rather, the partnership is all about enabling its “media clients to improve the creation, management and multi-format delivery of their content in a seamless manner,” Chatrath said.
Besides channels, DTH and mobile TV, another area that’s of interest to BT Media is movies. “We are in discussions to tie up with post-production houses in India,” according to Chatrath. Again, the objective is to “deliver collaborative workflow and networked services to allow our customers to seamlessly extend their brands to any device in any location”.
Speaking on the mobile TV business, he said: “It’s important to make money out of it.” Internationally, for instance, the content that is popular on mobile TV are clips of sports events, news and weather.
On whether the company would get into digital distribution of films in theatres, Chatrath said: “We are looking at it carefully at this point.” But, he admitted that it’s an area holding much promise in India.
On the challenges that BT Media faces in India, Chatrath pointed out that “fibre is not reliable”, which could result in disaster in this industry. “Even a flap of two seconds means a lot on the TV screen, for example,” he said. So, the need of the hour is to educate fibre producers about it. “It’s a big business, and India should not lose out on it,” he added.
Giving an indication of the size of the pie in this industry, he said that the post-production business is estimated to be worth over $1 billion in India.
While not divulging any investment figures for the India market, Chatrath said that BT Media would have three more customers (multi-channel platforms) in the Indian TV space soon.
Currently, it has partnership with NDTV and Star TV. As for DTH players, BT Media is in talks with all existing players-TataSky and Dish TV. At least three more DTH players are planning to launch soon-these include Bharti, Reliance Communications and Sun TV. The tieups are both for enabling Indian content to reach out to the international audience, and also for getting international content into India.
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