iWorld
ZEE5 and Wework host discussion on changing landscape of the digital world
MUMBAI: Addressingthe rapidly evolving digital ecosystem in India, ZEE5 India and WeWork India today co-created an evening of discussions on the Changing Landscape of the Digital World.Tarun Katial, CEO – ZEE5 India, India’s fastest growing ConTech brand, and Ryan Bennett, CWeO of WeWork India, welcomed the guests present for the evening.Bringing forth expert voices from multiple sectors of the techno-sphere, the event was attended by content creators and enablers alike, making it an eclectic mix in the room.
The evening comprised of two separate panel discussionscentred on Technology and Content.
• Themed on ‘Transforming technologies in the digital media landscape’, the Technology-focussed discussion brought Deepak Pande, Associate Director – Vodafone Idea, Vijay Kolli, Head – Mobile Strategy, Akamai Technologies and Ashish Dhawan, Managing Director – Enterprise Business, Amazon Web Services on the panel, moderated by Tushar Vohra, Head – Technology, ZEE5 India.
• The Content discussion that revolved around ‘OTT: The golden age of screenagers | How digital video streaming has become a lifestyle!’ brought Ekta Kapoor, Joint Managing Director, Balaji Telefilms, renowned actress Dia Mirza,and Ashvini Yardi, Bollywood Producer together moderated by Tarun Katial.
ZEE5 and WeWork have been disruptors in their respective areas of business, and the digital ecosystem as a whole. Leveraging the synergies,the initiative aims to bring the community together to encourage industry-wide conversations around the evolution of digital world and how the players can collaborate to offer a valuable solution to the viewer.
Tarun Katial, CEO, ZEE5 India said,“The boom in digital infrastructure in the country today has enabled the man on the street to consume content in his preferred language anytime, anywhere. For the OTT industry to remain ahead of the game always, we believe that the industry needs to come together to chart out a growth trajectory which changes keeping country’s dynamic digital landscape in mind.WeWork and ZEE5 have been disruptors in their individual capacities, and we couldn’t have chosen a better partner to set forth on this journey. With thought leaders of the calibre we saw here today, this was certainly an interesting first of many such discussions we hope to spur in the ecosystem.”
Ryan Bennett, CWeO, WeWork India, “We are thrilled to host this interesting discussion on the changing landscape of the digital world. Such discussions help in bringing together young innovators and leverage their synergies to find solutions to relevant issues, while collaborating and developing long-lasting relationships amongst one another. Fostering this community-building spirit and encouraging industry-wide conversations is our passion as we are constantly undertaking initiatives that bring the community together.”
Ekta Kapoor, Joint Managing Director, Balaji Telefilms, “There are three faces to every viewer – the family face, the friend's face and the face when you are alone. In my view, digital viewing is for that third face – what you watch when you are alone. Different kinds of content work for different kinds of people in different places. Television has evolved over the past 20 years; storytelling has changed. I can tell you with confidence that no medium is dying, all of them are heading towards peaceful co-existence. For every user who is going digital in urban areas, there is one person who has bought a new TV in a village. There is no one size that fits all in content. Different communities are watching different things. So hyper-personalisation is the new normal.”
Dia Mirza, Actor, Producer, UN Environment Goodwill Ambassador & United Nations Secretary General Advocate for Sustainable Development Goals, “Social content is driving people to viewing a different kind of content – be it cinema, television or the web series. People are connecting with the stories that they see now. I believe that there is a larger purpose to story-telling and it is a powerful medium to change the way that people are thinking. Self-expression is key. The digital medium has democratised content, and this means an explosion of good content like never before bringing ample opportunity for the talented people out there who are struggling to find enough work in the industry today.”
Ashvini Yardi, Content Producer and Founder of Viniyard Films, “I have been in the industry for the longest time and have seen the industry change in these years. Content has always been the striving force for a successful project be it on GEC channels, Cinema or digital platforms. While I was working with one of the most popular channels, I realised I wanted to explore something new and that's when OMG (the movie) happened. Moving away from something I knew and enjoyed was not easy, but films – especially OMG – was something that fascinated me, and I took the chance to explore my passion. Today I look back and feel it was a good decision. OTT is a great platform to showcase one's creativity and to choose the right channel for the content. Each channel has a different target audience and one has the freedom to create success stories, if chosen wisely. I think the industry is only going to boom with amazing work and talent.”
Vijay Kolli, Head of Mobile Strategy, AKAMAI, “Hyper-personalisation is here to stay. Platforms are increasingly looking for the right kind of content to build viewer stickiness with the platform. We, at Akamai, carried out a survey to understand audiences’ emotional reactions to the content they were they consuming. The insights from this survey has helped us in laying out the philosophy for ad integration into OTT platforms and developing tools to gauge this effectively. As we inch towards 5G implementation, demand will rise for applications of Artificial Reality and its high interactivity component. Given Japan is moving closer to the year of hosting the Olympics, they are investing heavily into AR to elevate the entire experience; we are seeing a lot of movement there.”
Deepak Pande, Associate Director, IoT, Vodafone Business Services, “There are two stories to hyper-personalisation – besides the obvious, there is a set of people who are worried that in case of too much personalisation, they may miss out on some spectrum of content. Convergence of technologies is happening at an unprecedented level and this will have a profound impact on the experiences that consumers are seeking. Possibility of what can be achieved through implementation of 5G is enormous, the cost is what we have to ready to bear.”
Ashish Dhawan, Managing Director – Enterprise, Amazon Web Services, “Hyper-personalisation is complicated – applying all the tools to read and analyse the consumption trends generated by the viewerand then accessing the appropriate CX to present content to them. Difference between 4G and 5G is not just speed but the reduction in delay of response. Communication across time zones and across the ends of the planet will get lower. And with this, we will see an immediate benefit to sectors such as healthcare, education, entertainment and such.”
iWorld
Inside Studio Blo: Meet Joel James the boy who codes by day and composes by night
The 23-year-old co-founder rewriting India’s AI film story, one algorithm and arpeggio at a time
MUMBAI: Here is a fun riddle: What do you get when you cross a coder with a composer, hand him a film studio, and let him loose on Hindi cinema? The answer, apparently, is Joel James, co-founder and chief of innovation at Studio Blo, India’s pioneering AI film studio. At 23, he is only just warming up.
Ask him how his two worlds, music and technology, manage to coexist without one swallowing the other, and he barely pauses. “They’re more connected than they sound,” he says. “Music is essentially programming, it’s all about patterns. Since day one, I’ve been drawn to finding patterns. In music, it’s about discovering patterns that make people groove, and in tech, it’s about building efficient patterns that make things work. One is emotional, the other is functional, but both come from the same instinct.”
That instinct, it turns out, is rather a useful one to have when your job is to convince an entire creative industry that the robot is not coming for its lunch.
“AI doesn’t replace creativity, it reduces friction.”
The conversation around artificial intelligence and the arts has, for some years now, produced more heat than light. Artists worry. Labels panic. Op-ed writers have a field day. James finds it all slightly beside the point. “Every generation has had tools that were initially seen as shortcuts, synths, sampling, autotune, but they eventually became part of the creative language,” he says. “AI is no different.”
He has a case study to hand. While scoring a feature film, he used AI to explore four distinct choir styles from different regions of India before settling on recording an actual choir in the North East. “AI helped us get there faster,” he explains. “It let us test, iterate, and refine instead of guessing for weeks.” The point, he insists, is not that AI created something impossible. It is that it let him fail fast, test an idea, discard it, and try again, without the usual cost in time and money that makes experimentation a luxury most productions cannot afford.
The synth did not kill the guitarist. The loop pedal did not bury the drummer. AI, James argues, is simply the newest instrument in a very long orchestra, except this one occasionally surprises you.
“There have been moments where AI generates something slightly off, like a vocal texture that isn’t perfect but has character,” he says, with what sounds like genuine affection for the glitch. “Those imperfections can feel very human. I’ve used a few of those because they add unpredictability and texture that I might not have created intentionally.” The machine makes a mistake; the composer hears music. It is, in its way, a rather elegant partnership.
“Creators often lose momentum because production can be slow, expensive, or technically complex.”
This philosophy, that the best technology is the kind that gets out of your way, shapes everything Studio Blo is trying to do. “The biggest problem is friction between idea and execution,” James says. “At Studio Blo, we focus on fixing the boring parts, streamlining tools and workflows so that directors and creators can focus purely on creating.” It is the unglamorous mission statement of a generation that grew up watching brilliant ideas die in pre-production, not for lack of talent, but for lack of time and money.
It is also what brought him to the table with Shekhar Kapur, the legendary filmmaker whose credits span continents and decades. The collaboration, James describes, is less a mentorship and more a genuine exchange. “Experience is honestly the new currency,” he says. “Someone like Shekhar sir brings decades of storytelling instinct and a completely different worldview shaped over time. What I bring is new energy and the ability to enable that storytelling through technology, and sometimes even express those stories through sound in a new way. The intersection of experience and new-age tools is where the magic happens.” At 23, that is either a very wise observation or a very good line. Possibly both.
James has also worked with artists in the UK, and the difference in attitude, he says, is telling. “Interestingly, India is more open in many ways. We move at light speed when it comes to adopting new things. There is still some resistance, but that’s natural. Globally, there’s curiosity mixed with caution, but Indian creators tend to adapt very quickly once they see real value.” Given that India has historically adopted, adapted, and made entirely its own everything from the tabla to the synthesiser, this ought to surprise precisely no one.
“The hardest part is just trying to look serious all the time.”
Running an AI film studio at an age when most of one’s peers are navigating their first performance reviews comes with its own particular pressures. James is refreshingly candid about them. “It’s more psychological than anything else,” he says. “My role is to take on the stress but not let it affect me when it actually matters. I approach it a bit like athletes my age do, staying mentally sharp without burning out.” He pauses, then grins. “And sometimes, the hardest part is just trying to look serious all the time.” Fair enough. Keeping a straight face while building the future does sound like a full-time job in itself.
For all his enthusiasm about what AI can do, James is clear-eyed about what it cannot. A million generated songs a minute, he says, will never replace the thing that makes music matter. “Volume doesn’t replace identity. What makes music special is perspective, your story, your taste, your cultural context. AI can generate options, but it can’t replicate lived experience.” And then, with the confidence of someone who has actually thought this through, “I genuinely believe live music is about to rise more than ever. In India especially, audiences are shifting toward live experiences, and that’s where authenticity really stands out.” A concert ticket, in other words, will always carry more feeling than a playlist. AI can fill your headphones; it cannot fill a room.
Which brings him to perhaps the most paradoxical of his projects, FAIMOUS, a platform using AI to protect artists from AI. As deepfakes grow slicker and voice-cloning becomes trivially easy, the Indian music industry faces an identity crisis, quite literally. “With FAIMOUS, the focus is on identity protection and controlled usage,” James says. “As AI makes replication easier, it’s critical to build systems where artists have ownership over their voice, likeness, and creative output. It’s about enabling ethical, authorised use, not just preventing misuse.” Using the tools of disruption to defend against disruption is a very 21st century sort of paradox, and one James appears entirely unbothered by.
“Just do the hard part, it’s not that deep.”
At the end of all of it, the choir experiments and the AI glitches, the legendary collaborators and the deepfake battles, the composing and the coding and the effort to look serious, we ask him what he would tell a young artist who is afraid that AI will take their job. He thinks for approximately no time at all.
“Just do the hard part, it’s not that deep.”
Five words, delivered with the easy confidence of someone who has already stopped worrying and started building. Which, when you think about it, is the most useful piece of career advice that any algorithm, artificial or otherwise, could ever generate.
