Media Outsourcing Services in India
While IT, Banking and Finance companies across the United States and Europe are outsourcing their services to India in quest of quality output at a lower cost, there are some new sectors in India that have shown readiness to provide support to global companies. Media sector is one of those. India's largest television news broadcaster NDTV has announced a joint venture with the country's single largest BPO company, Genpact. Both the companies have agreed to offer content creation and other media services to worldwide customers.
According to sources, there are many independent processes that go into making a final media product. Often, these products are not made in-house. They can be shipped off to someone else to do the behind-the-scenes work. Now a days, 70 percent of all media work have become digital. Hence, they can be easily outsourced. NDTV is looking to enter the media processing filed that will allow outlets to maintain basic scripting and control.
Digitizing archives, logging, and metatagging -- by which all footage is digitized and transcribed so that it can be searched by key phrases - are some of the services which the company intends to provide. Format changing footage such as creating one minute podcasts from audio recordings, as well as craft editing are also anticipated services.
Financial news service Reuters' decision to move editorial jobs from US and Europe to India triggered a new outsourcing era in the global media and publishing business five years ago.
And, Britain's media sector will lose 4,000 jobs within 10 years, thanks to offshoring, says IT analyst Forrester.
Technology news portal CNET gets work done from India for research reports and news alerts, taking advantage of the timezone and keeping its news site fresh from 6 am onwards.
Moreover, publishers in US are doing pilot programs to make news pages designed and made from India for cost cutting as well as providing up to date news.
New York Times is already outsourcing many components of its publishing tools from a US-based software company, which is offshoring work to India. Digitalisation work of US newspapers are also outsourced to Indian companies.
UK-based Pearson group is doing many of its back office work from New Delhi. British newspapers are keeping a close watch on Reuters in India.
The outsourced publishing services business is doing a turnover of over Rs. 1,000 crore annually in India. Reuters centre in Bangalore will hire 60 people and monitor company announcements made in US and Europe and outsource basic data analysis, compile tables.
It admits that main reason for outsourcing is to save money. It employs over 300 non-editorial people who help in crunching market data in Bangalore.
"I know these plans are exciting and disturbing for some. They will inevitably have an effect on some peoples' responsibilities, work and jobs," says David Schlesinger, global managing editor, Reuters, in a memo put in the Poynter Institute Website.
"We will have to continue to look at other areas of editorial that could be done in a cost-effective way in Bangalore or another centre."
While a Reuters' trainee correspondent in Britain gets an annual package of Rs 21 lakh, it plans to hire Indians at quarter that amount.
"India is a happening place. Advances in technology have made it easy to do editorial and publishing work. You have a huge cost advantage," says Ranjit Singh, CEO of US-based TechBooks which does most of its outsourcing work from Delhi employing 2,000 people.
TechBooks clients include Cambridge University Press, Prentice Hall, Law Writer, Net Library among others. Its latest assignment is making Chicago Manual of Style which has been the reference for writers, editors, publishers, and anyone else working with words in US.
Players like Thomson Press, Macmillan, Integra, Newgen Imaging and Express KCS are doing flourishing outsourcing publishing business from India. Outsourcing of content and all other services in publishing industry is pegged at $2.5 billion globally.
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