English Entertainment
Star India goes whole hog on mobile
MUMBAI: Even as fierce rival Zee Entertainment continues with its ban on the use of mobiles in its corporate headquarters at Marathon Futurex in Mumbai, Star India has taken steps to make its HQ mobile friendly – a stone’s throw away from the Subhash Chandra promoted firm. 2,500 employees, who work in the 32 floor swanky Urmi Estate in central Mumbai, can enter the Star India premises using their handsets. Last year, the media conglomerate issued mobile IDs to employees and also installed numerous iCLASS SE readers at doors and gates throughout the building (apparently 19 or 20 floors of it are occupied by Star India).
The solution was provided by HID Global, a worldwide leader in trusted identity solutions courtesy its HID Mobile Access solution, powered by Seos, “As India’s largest multimedia company, we have extremely high security standards,” says Star India senior vice-president (administration & facilities) Sumir Yadav. “HID Global, known for being the market leader of access control solutions, was able to fulfill all our requirements. With HID Mobile Access, we can now take advantage of the latest technology in this mobile-first age and achieve better security without being intrusive or compromising the user experience.”
He reveals that the company relied on smart cards for building access in the past. The cards were easily damaged and often misplaced, resulting in costly re-issuance of badges. Another weakness of the card-based access system was its inefficiency. Each new or replacement card had to be provisioned manually, costing Star India time and money as it continued to grow over the years.
With the popularity of smartphones and other smart devices soaring in India in recent years, Yadav started to look for a new solution that could enable Star India to make use of employees’ smart devices for better physical security. “Mobility has always been rated highly in our offices, so from the get-go we knew the new access control solution had to work with smartphones,” adds Yadav.
The deployment, from the initial planning to the solution going online, took Star India only 12 weeks, and has been in operation since January 2016.
Mobile IDs, a core component of HID Mobile Access were provisioned via the solution’s robust online portal, making it possible for Star India’s IT administrators to issue or revoke mobile IDs quickly, easily and efficiently. Whenever a new employee joins the company, the IT administrators can effortlessly enroll them into the system by simply sending the employee an email invitation. The system-generated email contains directions and an activation code for the recipient to download and use the HID Mobile Access App. Upon entering the code and successfully activating the app, the employee can begin using his or her mobile device to unlock doors and gates at Star India.
“HID Mobile Access is very intuitive to use and helping to create a mobile-driven and secure workplace is the goal of our mobile access solution,” says HID Global India & SAARC director of sales, physical access control Vishwanath Kulkarni. “We are pleased that both Star India employees and the company’s IT administrators managing the solution are enjoying the experience.”
Feedback on HID Mobile Access from Star India employees has been positive, and the company is currently exploring options to deploy it to secure its canteen as well as its collaboration spaces. It is also considering expanding the scope of the solution to cover the management of its visitor and enable secure printing in the future.
HR managers are all praise for Star India’s initiative but they question how long Zee is going to continue with its mobile fatwa issued a couple of years ago wherein employees were barred from using their mobile phones at their desks; the devices are kept in custody and calls forwarded to their land lines.
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UK: The aerial is losing its grip. As broadband becomes the default way Britons watch television, the UK is edging towards a decisive, and divisive, question: should Freeview be switched off by 2034? The issue, highlighted in reporting by The Guardian, has exposed deep fault lines over access, affordability and the future of public service broadcasting.
For nearly 25 years, Freeview has delivered free-to-air television from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 to almost every corner of the country. Even now, it remains the UK’s largest TV platform, used in more than 16m homes and on around 10m main household sets. Yet the same broadcasters that built it are now pressing for its closure within eight years.
Their case rests on a structural shift in viewing. Smart TVs, superfast broadband and the Netflix-led streaming boom have pulled audiences online. Advertising economics have followed. By 2034, the number of homes using Freeview as their main TV set is forecast to fall from a peak of almost 12m in 2012 to fewer than 2m, making digital terrestrial television, or DTT, increasingly costly to sustain.
But critics say the rush to switch off risks abandoning those least able, or least willing, to move online.
“I don’t want to be choosing apps and making new accounts,” says Lynette, 80, from Kent. “It is time-consuming and irritating trying to work out where I want to be, to remember the sequence of clicks, with hieroglyphics instead of words. If I make a mistake I have to start again.”
Lynette is among nearly 100,000 people who have signed a “save Freeview” petition launched by campaign group Silver Voices. She fears the government is about to “take [Freeview] away from me and others who either don’t like, can’t afford, or can’t use online versions”.
Official figures underline the fault lines. A report commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport estimates that by 2035, 1.8m homes will still depend on Freeview. Ofcom’s analysis shows those households are more likely to be disabled, older, living alone, female, and based in the north of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Freeview is owned by the public service broadcasters through Everyone TV, which also operates Freesat and the newer streaming platform Freely. After two years of review, DCMS is expected to set out its position soon, drawing on three options proposed by Ofcom: a costly upgrade of Freeview’s ageing technology; maintaining a bare-bones service with only core PSB channels; or a full switch-off during the 2030s.
The broadcasters have rallied behind the third option. They argue that 2034 is the logical cut-off, when transmission contracts with network operator Arqiva expire. By then, they say, the cost of broadcasting to a dwindling audience will far outweigh the returns from TV advertising.
Ofcom agrees a crunch point is approaching. In July, the regulator warned of a “tipping point” within the next few years, after which it will no longer be commercially viable for broadcasters to carry the costs of DTT.
Others see risks beyond economics. Questions remain over whether internet TV can reliably deliver emergency broadcasts, such as the daily Covid updates, in the way that universally available DTT can. The UK radio industry has also warned that an internet-only future for TV could push up distribution costs and force some radio stations off air if PSBs no longer share Arqiva’s mast network.
“It is a political hot potato,” says Dennis Reed, founder of Silver Voices, who says he has “dissociated” his organisation from the government’s stakeholder forum, which he believes is “heavily biased” towards streaming.
The Future TV Taskforce, representing the PSBs, counters that moving online could “close the digital divide once and for all”. “We want to be able to plan to ensure that no one is left behind,” a spokesperson says, adding that rising DTT costs could otherwise mean cuts to programme budgets.
The numbers show the scale of the challenge. Of the 1.8m Freeview-dependent homes projected for 2035, around 1.1m are expected to have broadband but not use it for TV. The remaining 700,000 are forecast to lack a broadband connection altogether.
Veterans of the analogue switch-off, completed in 2012 after 76 years, recall similar fears of “TV blackout chaos”. Around 6 per cent of households were labelled “digital refuseniks”, yet a targeted help scheme and a national campaign, fronted by a robot called Digit Al voiced by Matt Lucas, delivered a largely smooth transition.
This time, the BBC is less keen to foot the bill. Tim Davie, the outgoing director general, has said the corporation should not fund a comparable support programme for a Freeview switch-off.
Research for Sky by Oliver & Ohlbaum suggests that with early awareness campaigns and digital inclusion measures, only about 330,000 households would ultimately need hands-on help ahead of a 2034 shutdown.
Meanwhile, viewing habits continue to fragment. Audience body Barb says 7 per cent of UK households no longer own a TV set, choosing to watch on other devices. In December, YouTube overtook the BBC’s combined channels in total UK viewing across TVs, smartphones and tablets, albeit measured at a minimum of three minutes.
That shift may accelerate. YouTube has recently blocked Barb and its partner Kantar from accessing viewing session data, limiting transparency just as online platforms consolidate power.
“When the government chose British Satellite Broadcasting as the ‘winner’ in satellite TV it was Rupert Murdoch’s Sky instead that came out on top,” says a senior TV executive quoted by The Guardian. “There already is such an outsider ready to be the winner in the transition to internet TV; it is YouTube.”
Freeview’s future now hangs on a familiar British dilemma: modernise fast and risk exclusion, or protect universality and pay the price. Either way, the aerial’s days as king of the living room look numbered.
