Infosys, TV18 to share cost, benefits of Source 18

Infosys BPO and TV18 have joined hands to set up a media-outsourcing firm, Source 18. Haresh Chawla, chief executive officer, TV18 Group, and Amitabh Chaudhary, managing director and chief executive officer, Infosys BPO, agree that it is a great partnership and will bring the best of both the worlds together.

CNBC-TV18 shares with domain-b an exclusive interview with Chawla and Chaudhary

What does this bring to the table for TV 18 and what sort of investments have you been looking at?
Chawla: I guess it is a massive space in the global media market. Clearly, media companies are looking at two reasons why this business is very important to them; one is, that everybody, including us, is realising that any content we generate, has to be available on multiple platforms and multiple devices for us to extract value from it. And that brings to fore, the issues of being able to process all that content in time for it to reach the market quickly.

That is one stream of increasing, as well as monetising the content that the media companies are generating. The other stream is that many media firms have got phenomenal amounts of archived content that is lying in an envelope format and is inaccessible to consumers.

The whole ability to convert that content and create a long tail of audio-visual content business is an opportunity. We believe that there is a massive global opportunity. Our business, TV18 will bring expertise of understanding the medium, as well as the knowledge on how to work with multiple platforms, along with Infosys and their understanding of how to scale up and handle these processes.

I think it is a great partnership for the market, which is expected to be fairly large in the whole data processing space, where text content was converted to digital format and now almost all text content is digital. A similar thing is likely to happen in the audio-visual space.