A booming market has led to the creation of one of the most interesting start-ups in media
Just when he was sitting back in his apartment in Bandra, Mumbai, the calls began. One news company was shifting from standard definition to high definition; could he help? A consortium led by Airtel was putting together a news channel in Bangladesh; could he put together the full business consulting piece? One of the big five wanted the technical audit done on the sale of a news channel.
Fernandes, 42, soon realised that he was at a loose end in a market which had a yawning gap for his kind of expertise. In a market with 122 news channels the need for someone who knew what news gathering, editing or distributing technology made sense for what budget, language or market was desperate. Fernandes had to give up the whole idea of taking a breather.
Castle Media was born in June 2010 in partnership with Ruwanmali Ediriwira. She is the ‘broadcast technology’ brains of the firm (the result of several years spent with Accenture and later Vodafone in the UK) while Fernandes is the ‘broadcast business’ expert.
Since June 2010, Fernandes and his team have had a breathless time, implementing nine projects — including the launch of Sanjeev Kapoor’s Food Food channel for Astro and Somoy (Bangladesh); provision of critical technical support and HD specialist-resourcing services for the International Broadcast Centre of the XIX Commonwealth Games in Delhi for Australia-based Global Television; and empanelment by Siemens to hire people for its media business. Fernandes, however, declines to share revenue numbers.
Much of the business coming Castle’s way is thanks to the 22 years Fernandes has spent in the industry, ending with Tata-Sky and Star in 2007. His Star stint in fact is the place where he cut his teeth on news technology. In 1998 he joined Star India on the broadcast engineering side and left as operations director in 2006. In 2003, when Star broke away from NDTV and launched its own operation, Fernandes was the one in charge of tech. That experience has stood him in good stead, he says.
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To Fernandes, the two biggest challenges that the estimated Rs 2,000 crore TV news business now faces are cost-cutting and digitisation. And these are impossible to master without understanding technology. For instance, the way to deal with equipment obsolescence, something most channels set up in 2003 face, is not necessarily by spending hundreds of crores on new equipment. It maybe a software solution like media cloud computing.
Fernandes explains that if a reporter is filing a story about Jayalalithaa from Chennai and wants to use a clip from the past, he has to ask headquarters for it. The whole process is fraught with cost, delay and stress – of searching for the clip, digitising it, sending the clip back and forth and integrating it in the story. Instead, cloud computing allows the reporter to log into a central location, run through the library, pull out the clip, use it in the story and send the complete story for broadcast.
The benefits go far beyond the immediate 7-10 per cent saving in newsgathering costs, says Ediriwira: “It makes it easier to sell the content, use it on different platforms (ipad, internet).” Similarly, everyone wants to digitise, but most people don’t know where to begin. The larger companies hire in-house experts, but there are small, regional channels which need outside consultants, such as Castle, to do the thinking for them.
“All innovation in broadcast technology, worldwide, has been led by only two genres, sports and news,” says Fernandes. And understanding news broadcast technology simply places Castle in a position to plug into need gaps anywhere in the world’s second largest TV market.
It looks like it will be a long time before Fernandes can take a break again.