Sarbani Bhatia
Senior Vice President, IT, Jagran
Prakashan Limited
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 media and entertainment industry continues to be largely driven by increasing digitisation, growing internet consumption and shifts in customer behaviour. It is now not enough to respond to user preferences – one needs to pre-empt them, and create and offer services ahead of competition. This is where AI acts as a transformative force, predicting market trends and customer needs.
Streaming services, which got a boost during the pandemic, continue to grow in an exponential way. A major transformation is being driven by customers’ demand for interactive and immersive experiences with AR as well as cross-platform seamless content accessibility.
Automated journalism is also emerging as a controversial example of such new technologies, by interpreting, analysing and editing data to produce content; testing headlines; sourcing information and identifying trending stories.
As videos are the hot favourites in content, video creation technology is gaining popularity and enabling content houses to meet the ever-growing demand for videos.
Data-driven analytics and strategies are being used by media and entertainment companies for targeted marketing as well. Important trends in the industry include leveraging data for insights; AI for content creation, personalisation and management; bandwidth optimisation for enhancing the streaming output and automation for streamlining workflows.
What new-age technologies are being deployed by your organisation? What have been the key benefits?
Data-driven insights are being leveraged in our organisation to grow the business and develop new offerings. Using AI/ ML and analytics based on customer behaviour parameters has helped us identify customer segments, and design products and content specifically meant for each of those segments. We designed newsroom dashboards for our journalists to understand the performance of various types of content.
These initiatives have paid off – our engagement level has increased immensely. We are now amongst the top 31 global news and information publishers, and ranked 8th among the top 10 India news and info publishers.
For our digital vertical, we have adopted a video-first approach and have invested heavily in good quality video production as well as streaming infrastructure.
Lastly, we needed a centralised next gen control centre, and have implemented an advanced solution which incorporates modern technologies such as AI , ML and automation to allow central management of the entire enterprise security infrastructure and intelligent optimisation of network traffic.
What are the key challenges with respect to technology implementation? How are you dealing with risks associated with cybersecurity and data protection?
In my opinion, the biggest challenge is the need to make choices and decisions regarding new implementations despite the dichotomies that exist in every business – vision and strategy versus execution, growth versus profitability, short-term versus long-term, data versus intuition, man versus machine, customers versus employees and the toughest duality for every CIO – cost versus innovation. It is not enough to find a trade-off, leaders must find a win-win solution.
We have adopted a zero-trust cybersecurity model, transitioning from compliance-based security to a proactive risk-driven approach. Despite its cost, this strategy is essential for preventing even more expensive breaches. We also ensure regular security audits, diligent patch management, and robust access controls for legacy systems to effectively manage and mitigate risks.
We also have a Corporate Security Policy regarding access and usage of valuable and sensitive information. Data loss prevention, email gateways and access control tools have been deployed. In addition, AI-powered solutions have been deployed to continuously monitor data access, consumption and creation proactively.
What is your organisation’s plan for digital transformation in the next two to three years?
Our organisation spans multiple media sectors, including print, radio, digital, activation, experiential, outdoor advertising and OTT streaming services. As the lines between these segments blur, our focus remains on delivering compelling content and engaging audience experiences that can be monetised effectively. We plan to leverage GenAI to revolutionise content creation, production and management, and to personalise audience interactions. We also intend to bolster our video production and streaming capabilities, integrate AI/ML for better business insights and dynamic pricing, and utilise geo-tracking to optimise field operations and client servicing.
“It is now not enough to respond to user preferences – one needs to pre-empt them, and create and offer services ahead of competition.” Sarbani Bhatia
