We want to be a broadcast services gateway in India: TBS' Anna Lockwood

We are leveraging the PoPs for our global media network inter-connection

For Anna Lockwood, head of International, Telstra Broadcast Services (TBS), India is much more than a business centre. Born and raised in India, she started her film-making and media technology career in the country and worked here for a decade, before moving on to international roles. Telstra has many network connectivity offerings for  enterprises in India, and last year the company added two PoPs or endpoints for its global media network, one each in Mumbai and Chennai. In a video interview with Shivani Shinde, Lockwood talks about the significance of the India market, changing broadcasting rules due to the pandemic and changes in technologies. Edited excerpts:

What is the significance of the two points of presence (PoPs) that Telstra has set up in India in Chennai and Mumbai?

Telstra Broadcast Services (TBS) was started 6 years back. We knew that we wanted to work in both India and China, and we got the investments to connect our global media network to data centres in India, and also to end customers in India.

Our ambition is not to work as a network inside India. Our focus is to be a broadcast services gateway company that enables content — live sports content and entertainment content — to reach Indian audiences and also take Indian content to the rest of the world.

We leverage the infrastructure that Telstra does at the telco level. India is a highly regulated telco ecosystem, so we are very careful to be compliant with the regulations and the operator requirements here. We are leveraging the Chennai and Mumbai PoPs for our global media network interconnection.

These two PoPs add a new dimension to our India presence. Now, we can support the delivery of linear channels of scheduled content through broadcast and cable networks or on OTT platforms.  At the same time, we can offer occasional use services for sports, e-sports and entertainment events. This expansion opens India up to the larger sports, media and entertainment ecosystem. 

We’ve been offering telecommunications and internet connectivity to the Indian market for many years. But what is exciting is that now we also have true solutions and services for the media, entertainment and sports community – combining our investments in technology with our investments in people on the ground in India, specifically in the media and broadcast vertical.

Can you tell us about some of the media players you are working with in India?

We don’t have permission to talk about any specific customers. You can definitely say that all major sports events and major entertainment companies use our networks to get in and out of India. 

How has the pandemic changed broadcasting services?

Before the pandemic hit travel, Indian and global broadcasting companies would have their commentator or production crews on location. Today, Telstra is enabling remote production where the content is brought back to India for editing, commentary, highlights, reels, etc.

Because a lot of sports events happen in Australia, New Zealand and in the Asia Pacific, where our networks are strong, we’ve been able to add value to the Indian companies that are looking for network partners to bring content back in real time.

Since we work in live sports and we own networks it allows us to provide these remote production services both at the network layer and the professional services or broadcast services layer. 

How is technology disrupting the delivery of content at the studio level? 

Remote production is definitely a big change. The move to leverage cloud technology and use cloud platforms has been important for our ability to meet the requirements of our Indian customers. The rise of the Internet as a delivery mechanism is also a big change. So using internet delivery to reach our Indian clients and help them reach their clients has been a profound shift. The use of networks for remote production into the cloud, and the highest rates of internet usage are all changes that we’ve seen over the last six years.

Has TBS tried to reach out the Indian Premier League (IPL) as well?

We don’t have any contracts with the IPL, and we would love to work with them in the future. We do, however, do a huge amount of cricket related broadcasts. We have so much cricket on our network already that it is easy to take that into India, along with other rights holder broadcasters around the world. But we’re always looking for opportunities to work with Indian sports broadcasters.

Sports broadcasting underwent a huge shift during the pandemic and one of the high points of that shift was the way the Olympic Games were broadcast. What were the key take-aways for you from the event?

TBS had a team on the ground in Tokyo, and we were able to provide centralised services to many clients, including our India client, that allowed them to send much smaller teams to Tokyo. 

The Olympics experience required a lot of flexibility because it was already delayed by a year. And when the actual event happened, because of restrictions in the numbers of people who could get accreditation, a lot of the companies had to pivot to a remote production workflow. This meant that content was brought back to their own countries. For us, what was important was being flexible, and being able to provide more services than what we may have done in previous games because we were able to be on the ground.

From a technology perspective, the ability to use different parts of the Telstra network was something that our customers highly valued. Many things happened during the Olympics, such as circuits going down, issues with network connectivity, but because of the way the network has been architected, and because we had high redundancy and business continuity, we were able to deliver a flawless network service to our customers around the world.

Looking at the competitive landscape in India, what makes TBS unique?

There are several players who work in the Indian market. Including Indian and international companies. At TBS, we tried to establish ourselves as an entity with a local presence in India, one that works closely with our India team, but also brings in international expertise and experience with live sports and entertainment, which can be very valuable for Indian companies.

The mixture of investments we have in people and tech centres has helped us a lot. We have been able to combine that with our other investments in Australia and internationally on the media and broadcast side. That to me is a very interesting differentiator for a company either trying to get to India or for an Indian company trying to get out of India. 

When we think about the Indian market, we feel it’s a market where we are already playing an active role, but we definitely think that much more can be done to support and help grow the Indian market. One of the things that we will be focusing on is digital transformation among the media and broadcast companies in India.

Will we see Telstra being an aggressive player in the Indian ecosystem?

I only represent TBS. On the media and broadcast side, we do consider India to be an important market. Because there is such a high appetite for sports content in India and also because the Indian diaspora and many audiences around the world are interested in Indian content. So both content going into India and content coming out of India is an interesting and important market for us.

We have been fortunate to get investments from the company to connect our global media network into India and to continue expanding that capability. Moving into 2022 it will continue to be an important market for some of the major events that are coming up, both internationally and in India.

When you talk of remote production how do you make sure that the quality and continuity is not hampered?

We specialise in the delivery of live sports content and the networks are architected to have as low latency as possible. For some customers, that’s important. It also depends on which platform the content is being delivered to — the traditional television network or a streaming network. 

One of the things that we have been doing more of during the pandemic is e-sports and gaming. This includes the Indian market as well. And in e-sports the most important thing is the reliability and consistency of the network. So the latency and the bandwidth is actually less important than the stability of the network. Depending on the kind of projects that we work on, sometimes the technical requirements change.

What kind of content did India consume as well as send out during the pandemic?

We definitely saw a spike in gaming content, and e-sports content. We saw a spike in sports content, and also a big spike in educational content.  The Telstra network between March and June in 2020 saw an increase in overall traffic internationally by about 30 per cent. That has stabilised from June onwards and grown more gently after that, but we never went back to pre pandemic levels. So Telstra actually brought forward their investment in the international network. We invested in both our fiber network and our internet network. 

During the pandemic, we also built our new master control room in London. This manages content from all around the world, including content that goes into and out of India. We acquired a company called MediaCloud in May last year. It was an investment in cloud workflows that we probably would have done, but the pandemic accelerated that requirement for us to really not only have a platform and a technology, but also people who are all very familiar now with cloud workloads and cloud technology.