AWS helps broadcast service deliver digital news at speed and with accuracy through its 240 channels and programs, across more than 190 countries, to more than 894 million viewers and listeners
Prasar Bharati News Services (PBNS), the digital arm of India’s public broadcasting service Prasar Bharati, is using Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), to host and scale its expansive network, which offers over 240 live radio channels, including live news and entertainment programmes. By switching to AWS, PBNS will have the compute power, dependability, and scalability to deliver news to more than 894 million viewers and listeners in more than 190 countries with ease.
The goal of PBNS’s digital transformation is to better engage its target audience, particularly younger viewers and listeners, by offering cutting-edge digital content formats.
“At Prasar Bharati News Services, it is our duty to deliver accurate and timely news. The people is informed and educated about the progress and cultural variety of India. According to Samir Kumar, Head of PBNS and Digital Platform at Prasar Bharati, “AWS is essential to PBNS’s vision for digital transformation because it helps us access both current and potential new audiences that consume material online.
“With AWS, we have the scalability and dependability to quickly broadcast news across the country, providing our expanding audience with reliable information even during busy times. We are convinced that our cloud-first strategy for fast producing, transforming, and delivering digital content, made possible by AWS, will enable us to keep making information more available and pertinent to the expanding needs of our audience. By modernising our operations, promoting content reforms, and streamlining distribution, PBNS advances its objective to be a trustworthy public broadcaster.
“India’s media industry is transforming rapidly as the public consumes more digital news content, such as videos and podcasts, online, and on mobile apps. Media and entertainment organizations are among the major users of cloud services, and AWS is honored to support Prasar Bharati News Services’ goal to be a leader in delivering reliable news and information across India in the digital age,” said Pankaj Gupta, Leader – Public Sector Enterprises and Government, Healthcare, AISPL, AWS India and South Asia. “With AWS, Prasar Bharati can change the way it creates, manages, and distributes content to audiences—both old and new—locally and globally.”
Before switching to AWS, PBNS hosted its applications with a co-location IT service provider and encountered excessive latency, which led to performance and availability problems, including website outages and jerky video streaming. The dissemination of news and the viewing experience were both substantially impacted by this. To alter the way it serves information, PBNS required a broad set of cloud capabilities, from scalable compute and storage resources to content development, management, and archiving.
Live-streaming content and sharing videos across platforms like YouTube.
The PBNS Daily Magazine, live radio and TV podcasts, and the NewsOnAir website, which distributes news in eight different languages and is accessible to a global audience, can all be hosted and scaled effectively by PBNS using AWS. In order to improve collaboration between internal news units, social media teams, and outside news agencies based throughout India, the organisation also runs its News Data Management System (NDMS) on AWS.
This platform was created by PBNS and allows users to categorise, archive, and share content across regional news units. The purpose of NDMS, which functions as a content management system, is to make it simple for news reporters and stringers to swiftly upload their news and for news organisations to post news more quickly. 54 regional news organisations are currently using NDMS to increase access to the most recent news and provide information to audiences more quickly.
A managed services provider with a strong focus on cloud services in the public sector, Arsenal Infosolutions Private Limited, an AWS Select Partner, assisted PBNS in the successful migration and modernization of NDMS and the NewsOnAir application with AWS to accommodate the necessary performance and scale.
The broadcaster used Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to scale its media workload in response to listener and viewer demand after receiving assistance from Arsenal Infosolutions. Additionally, Arsenal Infosolutions used Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network with minimal latency and quick transfer rates. In order to simplify information sharing among Prasar Bharati’s news units, NDMS can now process and disseminate static and dynamic content safely and quickly thanks to Amazon CloudFront.
This enables NDMS to efficiently coordinate and provide crucial news to journalists and publishers, who in turn swiftly and precisely distribute digital material to millions of viewers and listeners. For instance, PBNS was able to send timely updates regarding “Oxygen Express,” a government of India project that sent vital supplies of medical oxygen across India via the railways, during the COVID-19 pandemic spike in 2021.
Additionally, PBNS makes use of Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), which makes it simple to set up, run, and scale databases in the cloud; Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), which automatically scales the file system as files are added and removed without the need for management or provisioning; Amazon API Gateway, which enables developers to easily create, publish, monitor, maintain, and secure APIs at any scale; and Amazon S3, an object storage service that provides industry-standard performance.