Press Release-based
With ‘Freedom from chores’ for every family as the objective, Voltas Beko Home Appliances Private Limited (VoltBek) has launched a series of digital short films, urging people to put their tiring experiences of 2020 behind and focus on their hopes & ambitions for 2021.
The goal is to inspire people, after what has been a rough year, to start 2021 on the right note and make their resolutions a reality.
Conceptualised by Interactive Avenues, Gurugram. Production: Prime Focus
By A Correspondent
Prime Focus Technologies (PFT), the technology arm of Prime Focus and Whip Media Group have announced a strategic supply chain partnership programme. The partnership, notes a communique, will provide media companies better transparency into their content workflows to maximise revenues, reduce costs, increase efficiencies, and get complete visibility and control over where and how television and movie titles are being distributed, both on a global scale and in real-time.
Said Carl Segal, Senior Vice President, Digital Distribution, Prime Focus Technologies: “Monetization of content providers’ catalogs is essential in today’s fast paced and competitive OTT and VOD landscape, making digital distribution and discovery of content to end users a critical component for M&E companies. It becomes imperative to not just monitor and measure effectiveness but analyse the results of that data in order to monetize content, Whip Media is a renowned name in the industry, working with the world’s leading entertainment companies and we are excited to partner with them.”
Added Alisa Joseph, Senior Vice President, Business Strategy & Development, Whip Media Group: “Automation of content avails management and distribution is crucial to achieve scale and enable faster time to market. PFT is well known for supply chain automation and has been selected as a Strategic Partner for their expertise in end-to-end digital distribution supply chain management,”. “We’re thrilled to partner with Prime Focus Technologies as our integration will help drive greater efficiencies to maximise the viewing and monetization of content.”
By A Correspondent
Prime Focus Technologies’ latest digital film for Coats brings to life the fun-filled Uttarayan festival, with a focus on strengthening familial bonds. The protagonist of the film brings all his family members closer together by baiting them to compete against one
Said Umesh Bopche, Vice President, Sales & Business Development, PFT: “Coats is an integral part of any Indian kite flying event, with a majority of industry players opting to use Coats’ high quality, cotton kite flying threads. Through this film, we wanted to highlight how they help people across the country enjoy the vibrant, sporting spirit of Uttarayan.â€
Added Rajesh Satija, Vice President Marketing, Coats India: “Coats is world’s leading manufacturer of industrial threads. In India we are market leader in sewing thread and kite flying thread. Come January, and our products take on a special significance during the Kite Flying festival. We are extremely happy with the way PFT created this film as an endearing slice of life that audiences can easily relate to.â€
By A Correspondent
The fifth edition of the Coal India Hockey India League (CIHIL) saw the coming together of two entities to support the sport in India. Media services major Prime Focus Limited (PFL) announced their association with the Dabang Mumbai Hockey Club (DMHC)as an Associate Sponsor.
Commenting on the association with DMHC, Vikas Rathee, CFO, Prime Focus, said, “This is our first association with a hockey team, and we are extremely proud and excited to be supporting Dabang Mumbai HC. This is a team of world-class Indian and International players, including 5 players from the Junior World Cup that lifted the trophy in 2016 after 15 years. At Prime Focus, one of our key objectives is to empower the young artists of our country, by ensuring that they learn the skills required to play on a level playing field with the very best creative talent from across the globe. We found a reflection of our values in DMHC’s endeavor to promote and encourage the young hockey talent of India to not only compete locally, but ultimately to reclaim India’s world supremacy in the sport. Associating with DMHC fits perfectly with our brand proposition.â€
Commenting further on this partnership, Saumya Khaitan, Chief Executive Officer, Dabang Mumbai Hockey Club said, “To partner with a company like Prime Focus, which has attained worldwide recognition for excelling at its services in India and overseas, gives us immense pleasure and pride. It can add a lot of value not just financially, but also by helping us learn to further package the final product better for a visual treat. We look forward to a long-term partnership with Prime Focus, which would further help the national sport get the acknowledgment it deservesâ€.
Reliance Group has announced the combination of the global film & media services business of Reliance MediaWorks’ (RMW) with Prime Focus Ltd.
The combination of RMW – PFL and Academy Award winning Double Negative, led by Matt Holben and Alex Hope, creates the world’s largest and the most integrated media services group with over 5500 people present across 20 locations offering visual effects, stereo 3D conversion, animation, and cloud-based digital media solutions that transcend the film, advertising and television industries. The combination brings instant benefits to global clients, with new levels of creativity, technology innovation, truly integrated Digital Media Services, unmatched scale, financial stability and sustainability.
The combined group will also have the world’s first hybrid cloud-enabled Media ERP platform. The platform virtualizes the content supply chain and helps broadcasters, studios, brands, sports and digital businesses manage their business of content, by driving creative enablement, enhancing ecosystem efficiencies and sustainability, reducing costs and realizing new monetization opportunities.
Namit Malhotra will be the Executive Chairman and Global CEO of Prime Focus Ltd.
“We are hugely excited about the transformational growth opportunity created by the powerful combination of the global film and media services business of Reliance MediaWorks and Prime Focus,” said Amitabh Jhunjhunwala, Group Managing Director, Reliance Group. “Namit is an enormously passionate leader, who has created and run a highly successful global media services business. We are delighted to have the opportunity to support PFL as the Company moves to the next orbit of growth under Namit’s dynamic and ‘turbo-charged’ leadership”, he added.
The body of work handled by the new entity includes worldwide blockbusters and critically acclaimed films, such as The Dark Knight Trilogy, Transformers 4, Inception, Gravity, Harry Potter, and Avatar, to name a few. Equally within India, the PFL and RMW combination brings integrated services to the Bollywood industry from equipment rental, and shooting stages up to final digital distribution – a true one stop service.
By A Correspondent
There’s a lot that is being said on how the advent of technology has revolutionized the M&E ecosystem. With the emergence of newer technologies and players offering these services, it becomes a challenge to find a balance in providing technology with creativity and content. The session on ‘Monetization Opportunities in the Multiscreen World’ sought to throw light on how the ecosystem was witnessing an interesting shift in revenue-sharing models and how companies could monetize effectively during these challenging times.
The panelists included Sam Balsara, Chairman & MD, Madison World; Satyan Gajwani, CEO, Times Internet Panel; Chakrapani Gollapali, General Manager, Consumer Channels Group, Microsoft India; Neeraj Roy, MD & CEO, Hungama Digital Media; Rishi Jaitly, India Market Director, Twitter; Nikhil Naik, Head – Director, Global Content and Distribution, Vuclip; Karan Bedi, Founder & CEO, Tutorific! and Ramki Sankaranarayanan, CEO, Prime Focus who moderated the session.
Presenting an insightful outlook, Sam Balsara highlighted how the television and mobile will be the only two mediums that will continue to be dominant in the future and how the interplay between the two would result in positive growth of the industry. Balsara said that while television continued to find favour with advertisers, they were gradually waking up to the medium of digital as well. “But advertisers need to be flexible about how the viewer’s see their ads; not just on television but across multiple screens.”
Cautioning the audience, Balsara expressed discontent on how the older norm of doing business was seeing a shift that was not healthy. “The older model of doing advertising was 50-50; half from subscription and half from advertisers. But that has changed of late with more revenues coming from advertisers allowing them to have a greater say in content. It is important that we move back to the old model of 50-50 so that equilibrium is maintained and focus around content remains intact.”
According to Neeraj Roy, it is not true that monetization in India is not up to the mark. “Around Rs 1500-2000 crore is still being directed towards content and that was a very positive sign. But he expressed worry as he said that the monetization exercise was being limited to certain mediums only. The way out is to have a balance in the advertising-transaction ratio, said Roy. With the shift to 4G being imminent, Roy urged content providers to focus on providing content that is high on value as consumers will be willing to pay more provided they get quality content.
Providing a synopsis of his company, Rishi Jaitly said that more than 25 million users use twitter to discover content. Jaitly said that if companies concentrated on investing in value then the monetization will actually go up. “The world today is becoming mobile-first, so content providers needs to work on providing content that is of context and relevant. As a network, our focus would continue to be on fueling public conversation across multiple platforms,” affirmed Jaitly.
Highlighting the scope and challenges faced by his company, Satyan Gajwani said that it was great to see the digital ecosystem in India thriving but the challenge is in delivering content that is high-quality because at the end the customer is going to pay for it. Talking about the issue of piracy facing his portal gaana.com, Gajwani said that the only way to overcome that was by offering such high-value and widespread offering that the user will be forced to come back for anything and everything got to do with music. This will indirectly bring down the number of users going to pirated websites to seek such services.