Vigyan Prasar, the autonomous government body established to promote scientific temperament among the India’s youth wanted to set up an OTT (over the top) TV channel with content based on science. Vigyan Prasar is a unit of the Indian government’s Department of Science And Technology. Science on television has always been an integral activity to promote science, and AWS (Amazon Web Services) offered the best cloud infrastructure for scalability and search to set up the channel, known as India Science. India Science is a first-of-its-kind channel to present scientific content on a day to day basis for school children, youth, and the general public in India.
‘Need to nurture scientific temper’
Saurav Sen, Senior Consultant, Media for Vigyan Prasar was in charge of initiating the whole process of starting a science channel. Talking about the project, he said, “India has a vast youth population and requires a channel that disseminates scientific content that nurtures scientific temper. This is the first such channel that the Government of India has created. The OTT channel was about cloud from day one. We had to set up an infrastructure that was ideally suited to the kind of content we were preparing. This content would have a high shelf life, needed to be searchable by academia and researchers, and cover live events.”
India has a vast youth population and requires a channel that disseminates scientific content that nurtures scientific temper
Looking ahead
The cloud solution by AWS provided for all these functionalities. The channel could scale on demand, cover live events and frame by frame meta-tagging allows content to be easily discovered by those interested in science.
As the reach of this channel grows, Vigyan Prasar plans to add more resources and scale on demand with the help of AWS, in the noble cause of nurturing scientific curiosity and temperament and encouraging children to pursue science and technology as a career.
