Prime Focus CLEAR Boosts Indian Broadcasters

Global digital content services group Prime Focus Technologies (PFT) has installed CLEAR Edge servers at leading broadcasters in India to provide a flexible and cost-effective solution for advertisement distribution within the region.
The servers will help PFT's CLEAR content management and distribution platform securely link advertisers, brands, agencies and broadcasters. Over 150 channels including Zee, Sun, Sony, Star, Turner, Eenadu and Network 18, with benefit from the new service which combines ingest, storage and distribution.
The CLEAR platform, which was recognised as a 'Best of IBC' product at this year's show, will provide an end-to-end workflow from media release orders to delivery receipt notifications and builds on PFT's experience of managing over 85,000 broadcast masters in India each year. The solution, provided by CLEAR, is made as simple as possible for all users and files can be uploaded to the platform in a format of the agencies choice. Similarly, delivery can be customised to broadcasters' individual playout requirements.
This affects timescales within the advertising cycle dramatically. Vikram Sakhuja, CEO, GroupM South Asia, said: "I look forward to this helping reducing the lead time of ad booking to playout from two weeks to under a few hours. This benefits the whole market by making the industry more responsive and flexible. Sridhar R, CFO, GroupM South Asia, said: "The future is digital and digitisation and this is one of the major steps to bring in efficiency and effectiveness."
Working with broadcasters is key to the success of the CLEAR solution. Aneeta Pankaj, Head of Post-Production at Sony Entertainment Television, said: "PFT worked with us to make sure they really understood our internal workflows between sales, traffic and playout. This means that we now have an end to end file-based operation taking full advantage of PFT's CLEAR hybrid cloud technology."
Ranki Sankaranarayanan, Founder, President and CEO of PFT, said: "We're delighted to extend the benefits of our CLEAR platform to our partners and clients within the Indian advertising industry. Our solution can support the extensive volume of material generated by one of the world's premier advertising markets.
"CLEAR is a natural progression of us building on our years of experience as an organisation with a global infrastructure and a huge range of experience within content preparation, processing and distribution across platforms."
(KMcA)