Times Syndication Service

About Times Syndication Service

Times Syndication Service (TSS) is the content-licensing and syndication arm of Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. (BCCL), the publishers of The Times of India and the country's largest media conglomerate. Based in Mumbai, Maharashtra, TSS sells reprint rights to text, photographs, cartoons, illustrations and archival material drawn from the group's vast editorial library, and markets them to print publications, internet sites, corporates, content aggregators, libraries and research organisations in India and abroad. Its online storefront is TimesContent.com, a business-to-business portal where buyers can search, purchase and download licensed content. TSS sits inside a group whose print properties include The Times of India, The Economic Times, Navbharat Times, Mumbai Mirror, Bangalore Mirror and Maharashtra Times, giving it access to an archive that stretches back to the 19th century.

Overview

Times Syndication Service functions as the commercial gateway to the Times Group's century-and-a-half of published material. Where BCCL's newspapers and magazines create journalism, TSS packages and licenses it: articles and features for republication, photographs for print and digital use, editorial cartoons and illustrations, and even microfilms of old editions for researchers. The division grants reprint rights rather than selling ownership, so copyright remains with the group while clients buy defined usage rights. Buyers range from other newspaper organisations and authors to corporates that need content for in-house usage such as marketing and presentations, and research bodies and libraries that work with archival material.

The syndication division distributes to an unusually broad client list because the Times Group itself publishes across so many categories — English and Indian-language dailies, business newspapers, entertainment channels and magazines. Its sales team historically worked by phone and email: clients would ring up requesting a particular item, and TSS staff would search manually and email the file. The launch of the TimesContent.com portal in 2009 moved that workflow online, letting clients log in, search the tagged archive, buy and download directly.

The Times Group behind the service

TSS draws its value from the publishing empire built by Bennett, Coleman & Co., a company with roots going back to 1838 and the launch of what became The Times of India. By the time TSS began selling licensed content online, BCCL's print portfolio included The Times of India, The Economic Times, Navbharat Times, Sandhya Times, Mumbai Mirror, Bangalore Mirror and Maharashtra Times, alongside interests in radio (Radio Mirchi), television (Times Now, Zoom, ET Now), music (Times Music) and the internet (Times Internet Ltd and Times Business Solutions Ltd). World Wide Media, owner of Femina and Filmfare, was at the time a joint venture between BCCL and the BBC.

That sprawling footprint matters for syndication because each property generates its own content stream — news photography from the dailies, business graphics from The Economic Times, celebrity imagery from the entertainment titles — and all of it becomes licensable inventory. Few Indian media houses can offer a single-window license to text and picture archives across news, business, film and lifestyle categories the way the Times Group can, which is the structural reason TSS exists as a standalone division rather than a desk inside one newspaper.

What TSS licenses

The core products are reprint rights to text articles and features from the group's publications, and usage licenses for photographs, editorial cartoons and illustrations. A distinct line of business is archival: TSS sells digitised images and microfilms from the group's historical collection, which TSS has described as including images dating from the 1900s — the oldest on the TimesContent portal include photographs of Bal Gangadhar Tilak at Churchgate station — and text archives that the division says reach back to 1838. Bollywood photographs have historically been the strongest sellers, accounting for about half the images bought on the site, followed by old political and historical photographs, such as those of Rajiv Gandhi and his family. Infographics — charts and graphs from the business papers — are another popular category.

Beyond individual sales, TSS supplies RSS feeds of articles from The Times of India organised by category — sports, politics, editorial and others — with usage tracked and billed to clients quarterly or annually. Microfilms are requested principally by research bodies and libraries. At the time of the portal's launch the site did not offer video, though the division said video could be added later depending on the customer base.

TimesContent.com and the move online

In mid-2009 TSS launched TimesContent.com, a B2B website for selling archived images and content online, reported by MediaNama that August. The portal opened with about 180,000 images handpicked from the Times library and specially tagged for search, with the division expecting to ramp up to half a million items within that fiscal year. The launch was framed as a digitisation project as much as a sales channel: old content was selectively digitised based on demand, and every image passed through a laborious tagging procedure using an extensive meta-tagging structure designed to make the archive searchable.

The person who managed the portal at launch was Sidhant Khosla, Director of the Corporate Group at BCCL. He described the efficiency gain plainly: previously clients called to request an item and staff searched manually; now buyers could log in, search, click to buy and download. The site carried a basic, monochromatic design — deliberately businesslike, Khosla said, because it was a B2B property — and was receiving about 2,000 hits a day shortly after launch.

Clients and the market it serves

TSS's client base is both domestic and international. At launch Khosla said a lot of the portal's clients were international, though he did not disclose the domestic-international split, and he declined to comment on total client numbers. People magazine was named as a regular buyer. The client categories mirror the product mix: other newspaper organisations and digital publishers buying text and pictures; authors licensing archival photographs for books; corporates licensing content for marketing, presentations and in-house publications; content aggregators redistributing licensed material; and libraries and research organisations working with microfilms and digitised archives.

The international interest is driven in large part by the archive's vintage material — photographs from early-20th-century India that have no equivalent elsewhere. That vintage inventory is also what differentiates TSS from general image banks: the Times Group's own history means its archive includes editorial photography and text from periods when few other Indian publishers existed in their current form.

Copyright protection

Copyright in all licensed content remains with BCCL; clients purchase usage rights, not ownership. TSS has policed that boundary. At the portal's launch Khosla described how the division had dealt with a Bangladeshi website that posted Times images without purchasing them — the site was made to shut down completely and subsequently became a paying customer. The anecdote captures how the syndication business works in practice: the value of the archive depends on enforcing the license, and TSS treats infringement as a sales opportunity as much as a legal matter.

Competition in content syndication

TSS operates in a market with both global and Indian competitors. Internationally, Getty Images and Corbis popularised the third-party syndication model — Getty alone owned some 70 million photos and illustrations after a run of acquisitions. In India, TSS's direct competitor at launch was ImagesBazaar, a subsidiary of Mash Audio Visuals Pvt Ltd (which also ran ModelsGuru.com), with about 6,000 clients and 700,000 photos, positioned primarily as an image bank. Another rival, India Today Images from the Syndications Today division of Living Media India, boasted coverage from 1975 and half a million photos.

TSS's answer to that competition was differentiation through heritage: vintage photographs that attract international buyers, plus text archives and images from the 19th century onward that a pure image bank cannot replicate. The syndication arms of Indian media houses generally compete on the depth of their own group's archive rather than on generic stock photography.

Licensing in the AI era

The economics of content licensing entered a new phase in the 2020s as artificial-intelligence companies began seeking publisher content for training and for chatbot answers. In September 2026 BCCL announced a content partnership with OpenAI covering its English and Indian-language publications, including live news coverage. Under the arrangement, ChatGPT may display excerpts and summaries of BCCL's journalism with attribution and links to the original articles, and the two companies said they would explore internal uses of AI technology such as archive search and translation.

No financial terms were disclosed, and it was not confirmed whether the deal follows the paid-licensing pattern of OpenAI's agreements with publishers such as the Associated Press, Axel Springer and News Corp. But the partnership underscores what TSS has always traded on: that a deep, well-organised archive of professionally produced journalism is a licensable asset whose value rises as new distribution technologies — first the web, then AI — create new buyers for it.

Business model

TSS earns through outright purchases and subscriptions. Individual buyers pay per item — an article, a photograph, a cartoon — while institutional clients subscribe for ongoing access, including the RSS article feeds that are billed quarterly or annually based on tracked usage. The digitisation strategy keeps costs tied to demand: old content is digitised selectively, prioritising material clients actually request, which is why the portal's inventory has grown from the initial 180,000 images toward the stated goal of half a million items.

The division's structure inside BCCL is that of a specialised commercial unit: it does not produce journalism itself, but monetises the output of every other division in the group. That positioning made it a natural fit when BCCL began reorganising — the Times Group's 2025 demerger plan, approved by the NCLT's Mumbai bench, proposed hiving off non-publishing businesses into a separate company, a reminder that content businesses like syndication sit at the boundary between publishing and services.

Place in India's agency landscape

Times Syndication Service occupies a distinct niche among Indian content providers. Unlike wire agencies such as PTI or UNI, which sell current news to media subscribers, TSS sells the past and the evergreen — archives, features, photographs and graphics. Unlike entertainment photo agencies, it sells across categories rather than specialising in one. Its closest analogues are the syndication arms of other large publishers, such as India Today's syndication division.

For Indian publishers, authors and researchers, TSS remains the first port of call for licensed Times Group material: a photograph from a 1960s Times of India front page, a cartoon from the editorial page, an infographic from The Economic Times, or reprint rights to a feature. In a media market where archival depth is rare, the division's century-plus of inventory is its moat, and TimesContent.com is the storefront that keeps that inventory working.