Amagi: Creating value in the TV broadcasting industry

Abstract

It was July 2013 and Amagi had just successfully helped MAA TV, one of South India’s popular General Entertainment Channels (GEC) successfully extend its broadcast to Singapore. MAA is broadcast in India via Insat 4A satellite and incidentally the transponder of the satellite also covered Singapore. MAA planned to leverage this access and distribute the existing India feed in Singapore at no additional costs. However, broadcast regulations in Singapore restrict the transmission of religious content in the country which posed a huge challenge to MAA as two hours of religious content was being aired in its feed in India. It was here that Amagi’s offering helped MAA to mask the two hours of religious content with other evergreen programmes only for the Singapore region. Amagi had come a long way from its initial days of trying to sell its standalone broadcast splitting technology to the channels. From what was supposed to be a technology company, it has metamorphosed into a full-fledged media company managing advertising airtime for some of India’s largest broadcasting channels and advertisers. In fact, Amagi is India’s largest TV Ad network selling over 30 million Ad Seconds. At the international level, Amagi has positioned itself as a broadcast management company helping channels provide customized content to multiple countries using a single stream. While the underlying technology developed by Amagi has mostly seen only incremental changes, it is the innovation in its offerings to the market that has led to Amagi’s success today.