NEW DELHI – For virtually everyone in TV except the celebrity news anchor, it will be a sobering thought.
According to two of the most ambitious companies in India, nearly half the media industry should logically be relocated to the subcontinent.
Genpact, the largest provider of offshore outsourcing services in India that is 33%-owned by General Electric Co., has allied with New Delhi Television, a leading broadcaster, in a 50-50 venture that breaks fresh ground for the industry.
Their new venture, which will initially target costly technical, editing and production functions in the audio-visual segment of the industry, is the latest sign of the growing threat to media jobs in the U.S. and Europe from low-cost offshore locations.
The companies will initially market their services to studios and TV networks looking to lower the cost of digitizing libraries of old programs – creating graphics and subtitles, editing raw footage, tagging material and archiving programs.
Prannoy Roy, NDTV's chairman, said 70% of the global media and entertainment industry, valued at $1.3 billion in 2005, could be digitized. Of that, 70% could be outsourced, potentially to India, he said.
"There's a lot of stuff which is expensive but easy to do," said Roy, who established NDTV's market-leading, English-language news channels in April 2003 after years of supplying programming to News Corp.'s Star.
"There are 50 years of analog tapes lying in vaults one mile long and they all have to be put onto disk, logged and meta-tagged. It's a massive one-off task that in many ways is like the Y2K debugging exercise of the late 1990s."
The relocation of high-value media jobs to India has begun to take off in other segments of the industry. Reuters moved 200 jobs to a facility in Bangalore that was inaugurated in October 2004.
Hollywood's animated film industry also has shifted significant business to India. "Shrek 2," "Spider-Man 2" and "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" benefited from India-based animators and visual effects specialists.
Pramod Bhasin, chief executive of Genpact, which was spun off from GE in 2004, expects skepticism over whether show biz will lend itself to the type of process re-engineering that has transformed other sectors.
"The growth of the entertainment industry in India has given rise to a lot of skilled people," he said. Roy expects that within a few years, the new venture will be the same size as his existing news business, which had sales of about $40 million last year and has a market capitalization of almost $330 million.
"This will be as big as our current business is very fast," he said.
"We're not offshoring anchors yet, but anything behind the camera should no longer be done onshore."
