Q1. Could you start by giving us a brief overview of your professional background, particularly focusing on your expertise in the industry?

I graduated in Computer Science, and I have been working in the IT industry for more than 2 decades now. I started my career as a software developer and have played various roles till this stage in my career. I have done product engineering, project & program delivery, and have managed distributed cross-geo teams. I have worked across various industry verticals and am currently working as a director of engineering with GlobalLogic's Media & Entertainment delivery unit. I am responsible for managing several engineering teams across the media spectrum, building products from content creation to distribution for several broadcasting & streaming customers. Watching the trend of streaming taking precedence over traditional broadcasting and being part of the technology backbone development for the streaming platforms has really been a fascinating experience. I am excited to see the impact AI is going to create on the M&E space. AI is going to unlock the implementation of a lot of use cases that were commercially not feasible to implement earlier.

Q2. How is the transition from traditional broadcasting to streaming reshaping the overall media value chain?

Transition from traditional linear broadcasting to streaming is at least a decade old and has become the primary channel of entertainment. This transition got accelerated partly due to COVID and cheap internet services across the world. The younger Gen Z audience really embraced digital streaming. The fact that streaming was device-friendly and didn't need a terrestrial antenna, cable TV, or DTH aided this transition as well. While traditional broadcasting is still a preferred medium for live sports or breaking news, entertainment has almost entirely shifted to streaming. Worldwide, the streaming viewership has officially surpassed broadcasting.

Transition to digital streaming also necessitated an overhaul to the entire media workflow, right from content creation, processing, and distribution. An entire range of new products is created, and existing products are modified to support digital content on systems like Media Asset Management, Media Processing, Audio/Video Editing, etc.

Another key shift is that spending for advertisements has also significantly moved to streaming, with streaming facilitating interactive ads and more accurate ways to measure ROI on ad spend.

Key driver in this shift has been technology like cloud, which enabled streaming platforms to create, store, process, and distribute content at scale near-realtime.

Q3. How is AI transforming the end-to-end content lifecycle—from creation and curation to distribution and monetization?

AI has brought significant disruption to all the work streams, both on the vertical and horizontal fronts.

Content Creation: Studios sit on a large amount of historical content, like movies, TV shows, and recordings of live TV events like sports. AI is being used here to discover viewer sentiments by analyzing social media feeds and serving curated content on AVOD. This will make users continue to engage with the platform.

Directors and producers are also using AI to generate visual storyboards from scripts to help artists internalize the scenes faster. This is also helping in creating the physical sets to match the scene requirements.

Content Curation: In the post-production scenario, the time taken to prepare the content for actual editing is being optimized by AI Agents, thus shortening the editing cycles. Another area where a lot of work has already been done is in the area of localization, such as generating subtitles in users' chosen languages.

Content Distribution: Semantic tagging of the content based on actors, emotions, locations, etc., by scanning the audio and video, is being done through AI algorithms, which is helping to generate customized program guides.

Content Monetization: Major change being brought in by AI in the monetization space is moving the revenue model towards an outcome-based model rather than the traditional flat-rate subscriptions. The paywalls are being dynamically tuned to discover the users who are likely to subscribe and entice them with offers to ensure the conversion.

Dynamic Ad generation is an area being majorly impacted by AI, helping change ad attributes like messaging, colors, and surroundings to suit the viewer's profile.

Another area of work is the interesting transformation of the ad-insertion model in the traditional broadcasting space. Work is being done to serve curated ads in the old set-top boxes by trying to digitally ID the users and serve customized ads to increase retention and monetization.

Q4. In what ways is audience fragmentation influencing content strategy as well as the underlying technology stack?

The olden days of the whole family gathering over a single television set to watch a movie, TV serial, or a live sports event are long over. While elders in the family are watching a cricket match on a broadcasting channel, middle-aged working people may be tracking the cricket score on a website while at work, and the younger ones are watching the same cricket match on their smartphones. This presents both a challenge and an opportunity to the broadcasters. The entire content creation, curation, distribution, and monetization workflow needs to be redesigned to cater to such a fragmented audience.

While the good old setup of capturing the live event and broadcasting it still holds good, the underlying technology to digitize the content into multiple streams, as stated above, will need a complete overhaul. A lot of work has already been done in the last decade to serve this diversity. However, a lot of work is being done now to produce short forms of the main content natively on these diverse platforms. While a movie is being shot, producers are also creating short TikTok forms of the main content for younger audiences to consume.

Sports clubs creating platforms for fan engagement is also a step towards engaging the community and turning it into monetization, like selling customized merchandise, etc.

Obviously, such an exercise will involve a change in tech stack. Organizations need to have people who can deal with all these platforms.

Q5. How is the competitive dynamic between global streaming platforms and regional players evolving from a technology and content standpoint?

We are seeing a consolidation of streaming platforms in the Indian context.  M&E firms, regional and international, invested a lot of capital in building OTT platforms to cater to the audience, which was largely operating from home during COVID. This led to the mushrooming of OTT platforms vying for the same audience. A lot of technology backbone, like video data platforms, electronic program guides, and scaled CDN infrastructure, was created on a war footing. However, once Covid restrictions eased, people started moving out, and this resulted in reduced time at home. This resulted in reduced average revenue per user (ARPU). This is resulting in the consolidation of streaming players. While the successful merger of Jio Cinemas and Disney Hotstar is one such example, the failure of Sony and Zee5 is also another one.

Most of the technology is standardized now, and very little differentiation exists between the streaming players. However, in the world of entertainment, content is the king, and this is resulting in skyrocketing content acquisition prices. Coupled with falling ARPU, this is putting a lot of strain on streaming players.

Q6. How do you see emerging technologies like immersive media or spatial computing influencing the next phase of innovation in media?

Immersive media—which includes Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR)—is fundamentally reshaping the Media and Entertainment (M&E) sector. By blurring the line between the physical and digital worlds, these technologies are shifting audiences from passive consumers of content to active participants.

The integration of sensors, 5G connectivity, and spatial computing is enabling new formats of storytelling, consumer engagement, and monetization. Things like Interactive viewing and 360-degree narratives are opening up interesting opportunities. Viewers getting to choose different camera angles during a live cricket match makes the viewers get engaged with the game much deeper.

Embedding sensors in sports equipment is helping generate insights that can be used by commentators while describing a player's capabilities or match analysis.

All these avenues are opening up new monetization channels where age-old passive structures are being morphed into omnichannel, multi-modal models. A pre- and post-event fan engagement model is letting event sponsors extend monetization spheres beyond the event scope.

Q7. If you were an investor looking at companies within the space, what critical question would you pose to their senior management?

The streaming space is crowded now, and as a user, I will certainly renew my subscriptions based on the content that is lined up over the next few months. Subscribers are resorting to renewing subscriptions on a monthly basis, preferring to renew the subscription for a month or two to consume all the content in that period.

As I have said before, content is the king, and as an investor, I will certainly look at a diverse content strategy like web series for various user profiles, live sports streaming rights, and tie up with global studios that have a lot of nostalgic content (Ex, movie franchises) to invest my money.