Suresh Vijayaraghavan
Chief Technology Officer (CTO), THG Publishing Pvt Ltd (The Hindu Group)
The media and entertainment industry is undergoing a significant transformation, fuelled by the swift adoption of cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and extended reality. Organisations are harnessing these advancements to drive business growth, enhance content quality and increase customer engagement. However, this rapid innovation also brings its own set of implementation and security challenges. Industry experts share their insights on the digital trends influencing the sector, how their organisations are deploying technology, the key challenges and their future growth strategies…
What are the key technology trends transforming the media and entertainment industry?
The print media industry is being transformed by several key technology trends. The most important ones are AI/ML and, of late, GenAI. AI algorithms analyse user behaviour to recommend personalised content, enhancing user engagement. AI is also being used in scriptwriting, video editing, and even generating news articles or music compositions. Predictive analytics helps in understanding audience preferences, optimising content distribution and enhancing marketing strategies. VR and AR create interactive and immersive content experiences that engage audiences in new and innovative ways. This transforms news storytelling, making it more engaging and providing audiences with a deeper understanding of complex issues by allowing them to experience stories first-hand.
Other emerging technologies include blockchain and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Blockchain provides a secure and transparent method for managing intellectual property rights and royalties. NFTs are unique digital assets representing ownership of content, artwork or media, creating new revenue streams for creators.
5G technology holds significant promise in terms of enhanced connectivity, mobile media consumption, cloud computing, content storage and distribution, remote collaboration and edge computing.
Social media integration in terms of content distribution, user-generated content, interactive and participatory content, interactive storytelling (where viewers influence the storyline and user participation via audience voting, comments and direct interaction with content creators) enhances engagement.
What new-age technologies are being deployed by your organisation? What have been the key benefits?
Sustaining the newsroom in a digital future requires a carefully planned and well-executed strategy driven by a deep understanding of readers and the evolving digital ecosystem. We also wanted to understand what our readers are thinking and feeling at every point in the user journey and tailor the experiences offered.
Our fully integrated digital-first content management system (CMS) platform empowers content creators with the necessary tools for multimedia storytelling. We are going to integrate the CMS with our archival system using AI tools and technologies that will help with semantic tagging of content. This, in turn, will help content creators identify content related to the topic that they are working on from within our archives, dating back 145 years.
Our user experience orchestration platform, by profiling the reader’s behaviour, can help identify articles that are relevant to the reader. At the same time, AI/ML-based content profiling engines help with content aggregation and identification of articles related to the ones being read. We adopt augmented AI technologies that are always working in the background and in real-time to continuously learn and enhance user engagement.
On the infrastructure side, we have consolidated all our production into a single cloud platform. This has given us the agility to scale infra up and down based on demand, and thus maintain consistent service levels. We are also exploiting serverless computing at the edge to assemble content from multiple sources in real time close to the subscriber to provide better performance.
What are the key challenges with respect to technology implementation? How are you dealing with risks associated with cybersecurity and data protection?
Today, the rate at which changes happen within the technology domain is the key challenge. Enhancing the skills of technical teams on a continuous basis is critical. Equally important is to enhance the ability of the organisation to use and exploit the new capabilities that these technologies bring in.
For cybersecurity and data protection, we have developed a comprehensive framework of controls based on various information security and cybersecurity standards. These cover process and technical controls.
What is your organisation’s plan for digital transformation in the next two to three years?
We had started our digital transformation journey formally three years ago, even though we have had an active digital presence for more than a decade. Now, three years into this journey, we have built a strong technology foundation to support the digital ambition of the organisation. Going forward, we will focus on using AI to improve productivity, aid content creation and augmentation, and enhance subscriber satisfaction.
“Our fully integrated digitalfirst CMS platform empowers content creators with the necessary tools for multimedia storytelling.” Suresh Vijayaraghavan
