PBNS Chooses AWS to Rapidly Scale Digital News Services in India and Around the World

Amazon Web Services has announced that Prasar Bharati News Services (PBNS), the digital arm of India’s public broadcasting service Prasar Bharati, is using AWS to host and extend its large network, which delivers over 240 live radio channels, including live news and entertainment programming. With the move to AWS, PBNS now has the computational capability, stability, and scalability to deliver news to over 894 million viewers and listeners in over 190 countries. Through this digital transition, PBNS hopes to create unique digital content formats and better engage its target audience, particularly younger viewers and listeners.

Samir Kumar, Head, PBNS and Digital Platform, Prasar Bharati, said, “At Prasar Bharati News Services, we have a responsibility to provide timely and accurate news. We inform and educate the public about India’s development and cultural diversity. AWS is instrumental to PBNS’s digital transformation roadmap, helping us reach existing and new audiences, who consume content digitally. With AWS, we have the reliability and scalability to distribute news across the nation at speed, constantly updating our growing audience with trusted information, even during peak periods. We are confident that our cloud-first approach to creating, transforming, and delivering digital content quickly, enabled by AWS, will help us continue to make information more accessible and relevant to the growing requirements of our audience. Using the cloud, PBNS drives its mission to be a trusted public broadcaster by innovating our operations, driving content reforms, and delivery.”

Pankaj Gupta, Leader – Public Sector Enterprises and Government, Healthcare, AISPL, AWS India and South Asia, said, “India’s media industry is transforming rapidly as the public consumes more digital news content, such as videos and podcasts, online, and on mobile apps. Media and entertainment organizations are among the major users of cloud services, and AWS is honored to support Prasar Bharati News Services’ goal to be a leader in delivering reliable news and information across India in the digital age. With AWS, Prasar Bharati can change the way it creates, manages, and distributes content to audiences—both old and new—locally and globally.”

Prior to switching to AWS, PBNS housed its applications with a co-location IT provider, which caused performance and availability concerns such as website unavailability and disrupted video streaming. This had a tremendous impact on news delivery and the audience experience. To revolutionize the way it delivers content, such as live-streaming material and sharing videos across platforms like YouTube, PBNS required a full set of cloud capabilities, ranging from scalable compute and storage resources to content development, administration, and archiving.

With AWS, PBNS can successfully host and scale its NewsOnAir website, which provides national and worldwide news in eight languages, live radio and TV podcasts, and the ‘PBNS Daily Magazine’ to its global audience. The organization also runs its News Data Management System (NDMS) on AWS, which is a platform built by PBNS to categorize, archive, and share content across regional news units in order to improve collaboration between internal news units, social media teams, and external news agencies based across India. As a content management system, NDMS intends to make it simple for news reporters and stringers to swiftly upload their material, and for news organizations to post news more quickly. NDMS is currently being used by 54 regional news units to improve access to the most recent news and deliver information to audiences more quickly.

Arsenal Infosolutions Private Limited, an AWS Select Partner with a strong focus on cloud services in the public sector, assisted PBNS in the successful migration and modernization of NDMS and the NewsOnAir application with AWS to provide the desired performance and scale. Arsenal Infosolutions assisted the broadcaster in implementing Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for resizable compute power to scale its media workload in response to viewer and listener demand. Arsenal Infosolutions also implemented Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network that securely distributes material with minimal latency and high transfer speeds. With Amazon CloudFront, NDMS can now securely and rapidly process and distribute static and dynamic content, facilitating information collaboration throughout Prasar Bharati’s news units. This enables NDMS to rapidly and correctly organize and provide essential news to news reporters and publishers, who then distribute digital material to millions of viewers and listeners in milliseconds. PBNS, for example, was able to provide timely updates regarding ‘Oxygen Express’, a government of India project that supplied crucial supplies of medical oxygen across India via railways during the COVID-19 pandemic spike in 2021.

PBNS also uses Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), which makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale databases in the cloud; Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), which automatically scales the file system as files are added and removed, without the need for management or provisioning; Amazon API Gateway, which makes it simple for developers to create, publish, monitor, maintain, and secure APIs at any scale; and Amazon S3, an object storage service offering industry-leading performance.