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Does Indian acquisition of iLab indicate dawn of post-outsourcing?

I thought the news that Reliance Mediaworks is to acquire iLab was worth sharing. The business case for this kind of acquisition feels very strong and it may turn out to be a shrewd move on Reliance's part.

In the short term there's the obvious benefits of linking the growing Indian-language production industry back to its biggest market. In thr future, however, the expansion of digital production capability worldwide and the growth in the extend of broadband infrastructure in India could lead to a lucrative business outsourcing metadata tagging, rough editing and the like, taking advantage of the low cost of file transfer in the digital production environment. Interestingly, this is something we suggested for the Digital Production Partnership (PDF), in 2008, hence I'll be watching its success or otherwise with interest.

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