Hotstar tech partner Prime Focus signs deals with Turner & sports broadcasters

Hotstar tech partner Prime Focus signs deals with Turner & sports broadcasters

Ramki Sankaranarayanan

MUMBAI: India's Prime Focus, which was recently in news for admitting and plugging the leak of an upcoming episode of Game of Thrones to be broadcast by its partner Star India's Hotstar, has signed technology deals with prominent traditional and digital broadcasters.

A link to view Episode 4 of Season 7 of Game of Thrones bearing a Star India watermark appeared online three days before its airdate as an outcome of an illegal breach of obligations by PFT's current and former employees. Following PFT's forensic investigations, Mumbai Cyber Cell arrested four accused on 14 August.

Prime Focus Technologies (PFT), the technology arm of Prime Focus, recently signed an agreement with Turner Latin America, where PFT's CLEAR™ Broadcast Cloud will provide work order and supply chain management along with end-to-end process monitoring of critical tasks, with reports and dashboards. "CLEAR was built as an ERP system tailor made for M&E and is well-poised to help Turner improve efficiencies across their supply chain with lowest TCOP, while enabling them to be the first to publish their content to multiple destinations," said Prime Focus Technologies CEO Ramki Sankaranarayanan.

PFT also manages the content operations for sports broadcasters. Also, the Sports Video Group recently welcomed PFT as a corporate sponsor. PFT creates CLEAR enterprise-resource-planning (ERP) software for the media and entertainment (M&E) industry.

Apart from Star, PFT is working with Disney, Warner Bros., Hearst, CBS Television Studios, 20th Century Fox Television Studios, Lionsgate, Showtime, A+E Networks, Tru TV, HBO, IFC Films, FX Networks, Miramax, CNBC Africa, TERN International, Sony Music, Google, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Hooq, Viacom’s Voot, Cricket Australia, BCCI, and The Associated Press and Indian Premier League.

"We chose CLEAR for three reasons: it is cloud native, multi-platform and easy to integrate through a solid Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach", said Turner Latin America VP - technology & operations Luis Esparza.

Operations at Turner Latin America's main content processing hub in Buenos Aires (Argentina) will be seamlessly connected with all other supply chain locations through the CLEAR hybrid cloud architecture. This will support multi-location distributed workflows such as subtitling and dubbing, compliance mastering, promo operations, archival, playout delivery as well as schedule driven distribution for OTT and VOD.

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