NEW DELHI: 20th Century Fox (Fox) has selected HP as its strategic cloud partner to offer cost-effective services to the Fox Business Units that leverage the Fox Enterprise Media Framework (EMF), a set of capabilities for managing, collaborating and distributing media assets globally.

Following the cloud deployment, Fox will reduce data center footprint by 70 per cent.

In addition, the company will also cut traditional compute and storage provisioning from five weeks to 15 minutes.

Fox is expected to shift 50 per cent of IT resources from commodity support to global service brokering.

20th Century Fox executive VP and CIO John Herbert said: "We continue to build upon our world-class digital supply chain by transforming into a cloud-enabled enterprise, providing the scalability and agility our business partners demand."

Fox?s cloud enterprise framework will be powered by an HP CloudSystem Enterprise including HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage, HP Cloud Service Automation, and HP Database and Middleware Automation to deliver cloud pooling of resources.

HP says that this will allow Fox to provide real- time consumption and capacity monitoring, resulting in transparent and competitive cost structures. Fox also plans to use the bursting capability of HP CloudSystem to burst to HP?s public cloud when peak demand requires additional capacity.

Zone-defined cloud security will allow Fox to create high-security cloud zones for media management and content distribution, delivering the full flexibility of a digital enterprise while mitigating the risk.

Unique cloud zone security profiles will be used for marketing, publicity and production content. These security cloud zones will be underpinned by solutions from the HP Enterprise Security portfolio.

HP COO Bill Veghte said: "20th Century Fox has taken a visionary approach, building its cloud infrastructure for the future. They are disrupting the traditional IT delivery methods and transforming themselves from a builder to a broker of IT services."

NEW DELHI: With Phase III of FM Radio auctions expected to begin in the next two to three months, the Electronic Media Monitoring Committee (EMMC) has been empowered to increase its capacity not only to monitor 800 television channels as against 300 at present, but also take on private radio services.

However, Information and Broadcasting (I&B) Ministry sources said this will not change the decision of the government about denying permission to the FM broadcasters from broadcasting news, as monitoring them would be a difficult process.

Established in 2008, the EMMC monitors about 191 channels on a 24X7 basis at present. I&B Ministry secretary Uday Kumar Varma confirmed to indiantelevision.com that the Expenditure Finance Committee had approved the proposal for expansion of the EMMC.

The EMMC monitors the content of all TV channels based on the uplinking and downlinking policy in India to check the violation of program and advertisement codes according to the Cable TV Networks (Regulation) Act.

Though the EMMC monitors private FM radio channels at present, it is dependent on the radio channel for recordings.

Sources said that a budget of Rs 90 crore has been cleared for the project. There are several regional channels that may be violating the program or advertising code and very often action against them is delayed because recordings of the objectionable telecasts are often not available. There are about 840 TV channels registered with the ministry at present.
The sources also feel that listening posts may have to be set up in cities to monitor the FM radio channels.

NEW DELHI: Telegraph services which had been the mainstay of relay of emergent information before the onset of the e-mail and mobile phones appears to be on the way out.

The state-run Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited has decided to discontinue the telegraph service from 15 July on the ground that it was no longer commercially viable. The service has been in existence for 160 years.

A circular issued by BSNL senior GM (Telegraph Services) Shameem Akhtar has been sent to various telecom districts and circle offices and denotes that telegram services will be closed from 15 July and as a result all telegraph offices under the management of BSNL will have to stop booking telegrams.

The BSNL circular has directed telecom offices to maintain the log books, service messages, delivery slips only for six months from the date of bookings. However, complaints, press reports and other messages from different consumer forums are to be kept for one year.

The decision has been taken after consultation with the Department of Posts which books the telegrams.

BSNL has instructed that surplus telegraph staff members would be deployed to mobile services, landline telephony, broadband services and shifting could take place within the next three months.

Faced with declining revenues, the government had revised the telegram charges after a gap of 60 years in May 2011. The telegram charges for inland services were raised to Rs 27.50 from Rs 3.50, Rs 4.50 earlier. Two months ago, telegram services for overseas communication were withdrawn by BSNL.

Meanwhile, BSNL is expecting its revenues to witness a dip to Rs 25,384 crore during 2012-13. BSNL?s revenue for 2011-12 was Rs 27,933.5 crore compared with Rs 29,687.62 crore a year ago.