Huddled in a quiet corner of a building in Calcutta’s infotech district, a bunch of bright minds is working 24x7 to bring to millions of homes across the world next-generation television viewing.

As more and more subscribers in the West “cut the cord”, switching from cable to Internet protocol television (IPTV), a hi-tech hub in Salt Lake’s Sector V is catering to a large chunk of the $20-billion worldwide IPTV market.

JunctionTV, an end-to-end video management and software services company incubated by Databazaar Infinity, a 50:50 joint venture between the US-headquartered Databazaar group and the city-based Infinity group, has set up its global hub for IPTV solutions in town, providing video content to all the continents.

JunctionTV, headquartered in Miami with a Silicon Valley office in Santa Clara, has the capability to build, deliver and maintain all the engineering pieces needed to take video content “from the lens of the camera to the eye of the audience”, declares CEO Samrat Ganguly.

“Our cloud-based, over-the-top IPTV system and related engineering services enable video content owners to produce, manage and deliver their content to audiences on any device, anywhere, anytime,” he adds.

So, if Sachin is batting 99 and you have to leave for an urgent meeting, you can carry his innings on your tablet to watch in the car or even on your handheld. Of course, that has to wait till IPTV services are made available in India.

“I believe we are only months away from launching the services in India. Technically, all you need is 800Kbps connectivity, but other logistics are being worked out,” Oney Seal, the CEO of Databazaar, tells Metro from Miami. Seal’s Media Ventures business is the largest Indian/Bengali movie distributor in the US using the JunctionTV platform.

Till then, the Calcutta pivot, which Ganguly and other JunctionTV co-founders had conceptualised in US research labs, will continue to deliver video content to IPTV viewers in Latin America, Europe, the US, Southeast Asia, Australia and Africa. The Sector V office of Databazaar Infinity is now a research lab for global operations, while Miami remains the business face of the venture.

“For the first time, such cutting-edge technology in the entertainment domain is being delivered to the world from India. This is made possible by our founding team of seasoned engineers in video delivery and distributed systems, some of them returning from Silicon Valley. Nothing can be better advertisement for Bengal’s IT opportunities,” says a proud Kalyan Kar, the CEO of Databazaar Infinity.

Kar, who had in the past co-founded and run one of Bengal’s bellwether IT companies, Acclaris India, is also the co-founder and executive director of InThink, the Infinity group’s knowledge venture.

Databazaar Infinity will acquire and manage more companies involved in cutting-edge technologies, and the focus will be on early-stage companies in emerging media, mobile application development, software technologies, and telecom services, according to Kar.

IPTV is projected to surpass the aggregated conventional cable and satellite TV viewing market of $130 billion by 2020, and the city nucleus of JunctionTV hopes to play a major role in this tech transition.

“For India, we might consider using carriers like MTNL and BSNL. Right now, we are concentrating on consolidating our repertoire of content,” stressed Ganguly.