At Mediatech Africa, CLEAR™, the award-winning hybrid cloud technology platform from
Prime Focus Technologies (PFT), was showcased on the stand of PFT’s South African
partner, LaserNet.
PFT was represented at the show by its co-founder and COO, Ganesh Sankaran.
Said Sankaran: “PFT is five years old and a division of the Prime Focus Group, a global
leader in media and entertainment industry services. We started PFT because our
regular visits to international trade shows like IBC and NAB revealed that there were
companies focusing on asset management and others specialising in workflows, but
none that combined the two. As we come from a post-production background it was
natural to spot the pain points in these systems.
“Our CLEAR platform is a media cloud infrastructure that was designed and built by a
team who understands media and has a strong IT background. Anyone who is in
possession of content is a potential PFT customer. We help content owners to monetise
their content. PFT has 200 software engineers in its R&D facility. For media processing
services it has 180 editing and sound mix rooms,’ said Sankaran.
PFT’s first South African client was free-to-air broadcaster e.tv, followed by pay-TV
news channel CNBC Africa. At Mediatech Africa Sankaran met with public service
broadcaster SABC.
Some of PFT’s international clients include ad agency JWT and Lowe, as well as Warner
Bros. Disney, The Associated Press, Netflix, Schawk!, CNBC, A+E TV and Bloomberg.
Sankaran continued: “We’ve just done an interesting project for Star Sports to enhance
their second screen experience. It’s our belief that new media has to be more interactive
and should involve social media. So we built an interactive platform for the Star Sports
web portal (www.starsports.com), which includes a timeline player with Facebook and
Twitter interaction.
“The portal is entirely interactive so that the viewer can find out about the players in
each match. We also have heat maps to show the game is progressing. Traditionally
with a sports website, the video player is in the website, but with www.starsports.com
we’ve put the website inside the video player offering interesting interactive
elements.’
Sankaran pointed out that content workflow is no longer sequential. “In the old days
you received a tape and put it into a machine. Now content comes into a portal and is
accessible to anyone working at a broadcaster, making the workflow concurrent. Thanks
to cloud technology like CLEAR, you can have access to your content anywhere in the
world. The need for a physical presence is gone.’
