OREANDA-NEWS.: Rare and historical documents from the archives of major libraries, films and documentaries of Doordarshan and Films Division of India can now be preserved in electronic form through digitisation.

Tata Communications Media Services soon plans to digitise such documents of historical and cultural significance.

“We see great scope of digitising and monetising older documents, and make these available for the public,” Sameer Kanse, Business Head, Tata Communications said today on the sidelines of the CommunicAsia2013 IT conference and exhibition being held from June 18-21 in Singapore.

“Media digitisation is a growth story in India,” he said, pointing to the archives of institutions like TV Today, Zee Network, Indian Express.

He estimates USD 7 billion worth of business in this segment of the digitisation and monetisation of the communications industry with a 30 per cent compounded aggregate growth in the business.

Elaborating, he said the archives were holding historical documents and films going back to 1947, namely speeches of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and other leaders.

Tata Communications has also launched the world’s first cloud-based broadcast quality video transcoding and delivery service.

The new content transformation service has already been selected by Viacom18, a joint venture between Viacom Inc and the Network18 Group, to provide high definition (HD) content transcoding and delivery via the cloud, Tata Communications said.

Developed in partnership with the US-based Harmonic, the service allows Viacom18 to maximise its return on investments made in creative programming and to tackle piracy by enabling simultaneous syndication play-out anywhere in the world.

The new service offers content creators, service providers and media professionals an integrated end-to-end workflow for moving content files to the cloud and transcoding them into broadcast quality formats ready for immediate delivery and transmission globally.

Viacom18 is currently using the service for the daily transcoding and delivery of HD Masters of leading Indian soap programmes to its customers in Pakistan for same day syndicated play-out.