In one of the recent and biggest moves by a corporate, Star TV is shifting
its entire IT infrastructure to India. Even the uplinking site is now being
moved to India. Outsourced to Reliance, the primary set-up is being based out of
Mumbai while the DR site is being set up at Bengaluru. Delhi and Chennai will be
the two uplinking sites for Star TV India.
Desi vs Videsi
India is a very important and possibly the leading market in Asia for Star
TVs business. Keeping that in mind the whole direction has now changed, wherein
the media giant is moving its entire IT set-up here. As part of this move, the
core applications including SAP and broadcast management system are also being
shifted to India. The transition is happening right now and by June it will be
ready.
"Star TV has a very strong IT infrastructure that supports all its activities
which is based on time performance," says Venkat Iyer, senior VP, IT, Star
India. "Until recently, all the IT needs of Star India were based out of Hong
Kong. But considering the growing base of Indian viewership, the company has
planned to shift its entire IT to India," he adds. The satellite uplinking
though still is happening from Hong Kong, but in the next few months it will be
totally based and controlled indigenously along with the IT set-up.
Star has chosen Reliance to host and manage its entire IT set-up as well as
the DR set-up. The entire circuit including the host sites, all the offices and
the uplinking sites are being interconnected through strong multiple fail-over
bandwidth connectivity. The entire set-up has been designed keeping in mind the
dynamics of Stars business. "We create various types of programs in-house, buy
third party made programs as well as outsource programs to various production
houses. Therefore, all this has to be managed and these programs have to be
synchronized and scheduled and broadcast on a timely basis as per the allotted
slots," informs Iyer. "And theres absolutely no scope of failure since all
these are time bound and even one second of delay means we lose huge business
through advertising revenue as well as viewership," he says.
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Virtualization has helped us bring down the number of servers drastically |
Venkat Iyer, senior VP, IT, Star India |
To support all these processes, Star is building a strong and reliable
multiple bandwidth network connectivity so that business continuity is not
hampered. The entire scheduling of the programs is taken care of by the
broadcast management system which is the core application running. All this data
is synchronized with SAP which is again integrated with Hyperion for business
intelligence analytics. Apart from that there is rights management system which
manages all the broadcasting rights purchased by Star for different programs.
The company is also coming up with digital content management system and CRM.
Star is also engaged in virtualization of its servers using VMware and Citric
solutions. "This has helped us to bring down the number of severs drastically.
Also it has ensured maximum resource utilization," opines Iyer. "We are also
very focused on implementing next-gen mobile and Internet technologies since
these are two big revenue models for us," he adds. WAP, SMS 2.0 and 3G are some
of the technologies that will be used for the purpose.
Piyali Guha
piyalig@cybermedia.co.in