BANGALORE, 7 MAY 2009 - Adlabs Films is setting up a 1,200 staff operation that will offer digital restoration and content processing services to the media content industry.
The migration worldwide from analog to digital content and the large number of formats and standards in the digital media content industry presents a large opportunity for the services being offered by Adlabs, said Anil Arjun, the company's CEO, on Thursday.
Mobile telephones, 3G wireless devices, DTH (Direct-To-Home television), HDTV (high-definition television), and the Web all require content to be converted to multiple formats, he added.
The move by Adlabs reflects the growing diversification of India's BPO (business process outsourcing) industry to offer services beyond call centers and business transaction processing.
Adlabs has expertise in the area of media content processing as it already offers a number of services, including post-production services, to India's film industry, popularly known as Bollywood, Arjun said.
The company will focus on both the conversion of analog content to digital, as well as processing new digital content, he added.
Among the services the company offers are restoration, encoding, transcoding, compression authoring, format and standards conversion, and meta tagging.
Adlabs said on Thursday that it has started business with some 300 staff at a facility in Mumbai. Its first assignment is to digitize and restore 1,000 films in the National Film Archive of India (NFAI), a unit of India's Ministry of Information & Broadcasting.
It plans to have 1,200 staff within a year.
Adlabs is a company of India's large Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani group, which also runs a telecommunications services company, Reliance Communications.
Over the last four months, Adlabs has delivered digitally about 26 Indian films to theatres in the U.S. using fiber-optic links from India. This communications capacity will also be available for receiving and delivering work done for customers in the U.S. and other countries, Arjun said. "We will be able to turn around work faster using the fiber optic link," he added.
