India’s public broadcasting service Prasar Bharati has switched its cloud service provider to achieve operational efficiencies by improving compute capacity, scalability, content production, management and archiving.
Previously hosting applications with a co-location IT provider, PBNS had experienced high latency issues affecting performance leading to poor distribution of news and the audience experience.
PBNS needed scalable computing and storage resources for content production and scalability to deliver news seamlessly to over 894 million viewers and listeners across 190 countries.
It is now using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host and scale its expansive network that offers over 240 live radio channels, including live news and entertainment programmes.
PBNS hosts its NewsOnAir website which publishes national and international news in eight languages, live radio and TV podcasts, and "PBNS Daily Magazine" for audiences around the world.
A source who didn’t wish to be identified told iTnews Asia that Prasar Bharati’s digital arm - Prasar Bharati News Services (PBNS) moved to AWS cloud two months ago.
“We decided to shift from Tata Cloud focussing on the benefits of a comprehensive set of cloud capabilities,” the source said.
News management platform
PBNS has built its News Data Management System (NDMS) on AWS.
The platform can categorise, archive, and share content across regional news units, to improve collaboration between internal news units, social media teams, and external news agencies across India.
PBNS chief Samir Kumar told the recent AWS New Delhi Summit that the cloud service provider was instrumental to their digital transformation roadmap not only in providing timely and accurate news but also in reaching existing and new audiences.
“We are working towards a cloud-first approach to create, transform, and deliver digital content quickly using AWS,” he said.
As a content management system, Kumar said NDMS aimed to support news reporters and stringers to quickly upload news, and for news organisations to publish news faster.
“We now have 54 regional news units using NDMS,” he added.
Kumar said they partnered with Arsenal Infosolutions Private Limited, a managed services provider with support from AWS Select Partner for the successful migration and modernisation of NDMS and the NewsOnAir application to the cloud.
PBNS had implemented Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for the resizable compute capacity to scale its media workload according to viewer and listener demand.
“We also deployed Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network to help NDMS handle and distribute static and dynamic content securely and rapidly among Prasar Bharati’s news units.”
PBNS also relies on Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) which eases processes to set up, operate, and scale databases in the cloud.
It also leverages other AWS services like the Elastic File System (EFS) that scales the file system automatically eliminating the need for management, Amazon API Gateway for developers to create, publish or monitor APIs and object storage service Amazon S3 for data availability.
Kumar said they are further exploring more cloud capabilities to implement in the near future.
