Prasar Bharati collaborates with AWS to scale its digital news services

Prasar Bharati News Services (PBNS), the digital wing of India’s public broadcasting service Prasar Bharati, has joined hands with Amazon Inc.'s cloud computing arm Amazon Web Services (AWS), to host and scale its network. 

PBNS offers news and entertainment programs to over 894 million viewers and listeners through 240 live radio channels, across 190 countries globally.

Prior to moving to AWS, PBNS hosted its applications with a co-location IT provider and experienced high latency, which caused performance and availability issues, such as website downtime and disrupted video streaming. This significantly affected the distribution of news and the audience experience, PBNS said.  

The broadcaster needed a comprehensive set of cloud capabilities, from scalable compute and storage resources to content production, management, and archiving, to transform the way it delivers content, such as live streaming content and sharing videos across platforms like YouTube. 

“At Prasar Bharati News Services, we have a responsibility to provide timely and accurate news. We inform and educate the public about India’s development and cultural diversity,” said Samir Kumar, Head, PBNS and Digital Platform, Prasar Bharati.  

On moving to AWS, Kumar said that they now have the "reliability and scalability to distribute news across the nation at speed, constantly updating audience with trusted information, even during peak periods. 

It has further enabled PBNS to effectively host and scale its NewsOnAir website, which publishes national and international news in eight languages, live radio and TV podcasts, and the ‘PBNS Daily Magazine’ to its audience around the world.  

Pankaj Gupta, Leader – Public Sector Enterprises and Government, Healthcare, AISPL, AWS India and South Asia, said that Prasar Bharati can now change the way it creates, manages, and distributes content to audiences—both old and new—locally and globally.” 

The organisation also runs its News Data Management System (NDMS) on AWS, which is a platform built by PBNS to categorise, archive, and share content across regional news units, to improve collaboration between internal news units, social media teams, and external news agencies based across India, he said. 

AWS' Select Partner, Arsenal Infosolutions Private limited, a managed cloud services provider has supported PBNS in the migration and modernization of NDMS and the NewsOnAir application. 

The NDMS quickly and accurately coordinates and delivers critical news to news reporters and publishers, who in turn, distribute digital content to millions of viewers and listeners in just a few milliseconds, as  Kumar said that during the Covid-19 pandemic spike in 2021, PBNS was able to provide timely updates about “Oxygen Express,” a government of India initiative that delivered critical supplies of medical oxygen across India through the railways. 

The media and entertainment industry is tasked with providing access to important information and top content quickly and effortlessly to viewers, presenting industry professionals with multiple challenges.

A January 2021 EY research revealed that 50% of media & entertainment executives can no longer rely on traditional business models to drive future growth and are looking at strategic and operational reinvention through the adoption of a cloud-based ecosystem for greater customer engagement and lowering cost framework.