Telecom News --

Tata Communications announces its GMES group with launch of Video Connect

Mumbai, 27 January, 2010

Acquisition of BT's Mosaic platform, enables digital media management and workflow; To invest around $50 million in the GMES group over two years

Tata Communications, a leading provider of the new world of communications, today announced its Global Media and Entertainment Solutions (GMES) group.

Tata Communications launched its dedicated global video network, Video Connect, and unveiled its media management platform, Mosaic, which Tata Communications recently acquired from BT Group plc. As part of the GMES portfolio, Video Connect and Mosaic, will complement Tata Communications' existing Media and Entertainment services, offering media companies an integrated end-to-end solution that enables global collaboration across the media ecosystem.

Through the GMES group, Tata Communications aims to maximize the opportunities that digital media provides by enabling end-to-end management, distribution and delivery of content over its life cycle from production to distribution. This makes Tata Communications a unique solutions provider, enabling collaboration and integration with various partners in the Media ecosystem and offers a robust global media delivery infrastructure to reach the end user.

The Media industry can thus address emerging challenges posed by globalization and the fragmented consumption of media using Tata Communications' portfolio.

Video Connect from Tata Communications

As the world's most advanced dedicated global video network, Video Connect is designed to help broadcasters, studios and production houses deliver video content flexibly and cost-effectively to media hotspots worldwide. By leveraging Tata Communications' global network infrastructure, Video Connect ensures permanent availability of bandwidth and seamless transmission of video at constant bit rates.

Video Connect offers up to 99.999% uptime by providing auto re-routing on diverse and protected paths on both primary routes as well as “around-the-globe” over and above the basic triple-protected SDH network between Video Connect PoPs. Thus, there are four redundant and diverse paths between each of the 12 Video Connect nodes across New York, Los Angeles, London, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney, Chennai, Mumbai, Pune, Delhi and Hyderabad, as well as more downstream partners in each region's PoP on the network.

A dedicated video network operations center ensures round-the-clock system availability along with video analytics to provide reports on video quality.

“Performance and price are the biggest challenges faced by online broadcasters today. Video Connect is designed to help them address these two challenges – performance is guaranteed by time-tested DTM technology running atop Tata Communications' robust backbone, while cost effectiveness is brought about by the direct routing nature of the network,” said Genius Wong, Sr. VP Network Services, Tata Communications.

Broadcasters can expect further savings from Video Connect's flexible pricing scheme as they can pick traffic direction and purchase the exact bandwidth required for a specific amount of time, and be billed according to usage. Video Connect's on-demand and customization capabilities also allow broadcasters to activate the service for special broadcasts and enable different feeds to be used for different time zones so that revenue streams can be created from local advertising.

Tata Communications' Mosaic Platform

The Tata Communications' Mosaic platform, with its cloud-based media management, helps media customers improve cross-enterprise collaboration for content creation, management and multiformat delivery.

Mosaic enables enterprises to deliver innovative services that meet rapidly changing consumer demands, maintain and expand audience numbers, provides flexibility of an open operating environment and lower production costs. One of Mosaic's unique capabilities is that it provides complete digital asset management, ensuring secure, efficient access to content and workflow throughout the value chain, which is delivered as an online service over the web.

Mosaic's service-oriented architecture enables media companies to monetize digital content more efficiently while addressing the challenges of globalization and fragmented consumption of media faced by the industry.

The new service is targeted at the entire spectrum of media customers encompassing content creators, producers, post-production houses, digital media publishers, content service providers and TV channels.

“The acquisition of the Mosaic platform strengthens our global media and entertainment portfolio with powerful cloud-based digital media management applications that can be accessed over the web. This enhances our existing portfolio of services that we are offering to the media and entertainment sector. Tata Communications intends to invest about $50 million to strengthen its media and entertainment portfolio over the next two years” said Vinod Kumar, President and COO, Tata Communications. “By integrating our global network infrastructure and managed services portfolio with Mosaic's digital media management capabilities, we are now able to create a unique platform that can take care of content workflow from production to distribution across the world.”

Julian Wheeler, part of the Mosaic team at BT, now as VP Global Media and Entertainment, Tata Communications said, “As a team, we're extremely excited to join Tata Communications. By leveraging the power of Mosaic with Tata Communications' capabilities we intend to address the challenges being faced in the Media and Entertainment market.”

In addition to Video Connect and Mosaic, other services in Tata Communications' GMES portfolio include Satellite Broadcasting with TV uplinking and Playout Room capabilities, The GMES solutions are closely integrated with Tata Communications' global media delivery infrastructure which include Content Delivery Network (CDN) service, Managed Services - Managed Security, Managed Hosting and Storage,, Ethernet and IPL capabilities. Tata Communications' current GMES customers include France's TV5MONDE, India's NDTV and Singapore's IAHGames.

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