Without doubt advances in digital media technology are having a profound effect on all our lives.
Internet based tools for broadcast distribution and media sharing; social networking, communication, and collaboration -- collectively captured under the Web 2.0 banner -- are dramatically rising in popularity. The same basic technology trend, one focused on interoperability, modularity, speed and flexibility rather than raw capability or performance, is having an equally profound effect on professional digital media content.
Media Companies and Web 2.0
Today, essentially all media production -- from motion pictures and TV to newspapers and magazines and from radio to music --is completely digital and in keeping with all previous patterns in technology development, the first major effects were not transformative but rather incremental as existing processes were simply automated. Going forward we are on the cusp of much more dramatic change driven by innovative new use cases themselves enabled by a rapidly maturing digital media ecosystem
As part of the maturing process, digital media technology is simultaneously changing how the various pieces interact with one-another. Up until recently, products were designed to solve a particular problem within digital media workflow. Today, raw performance metrics and basic feature capabilities are less important when choosing the right tool than are questions around how well the various tools work together. Ease of integration, convenience, flexibility, and indeed price are increasingly the basis on which digital media tools and services are judged.
With Web 2.0 technologies at the fore, we are entering an era where interoperability, modularity, and collaboration are critical. Systems that facilitate the workflow associated with organizing, editing, collaborating, and distributing media are essential, while alternatives such as ad hoc sharing of files via email and FTP are as inappropriate as a paper card catalog system would be at any modern library today. To complicate matters further, the Internet facilitates two-way communication that must be managed and filtered -- from immediate, rich and compelling contributions from communities with affinities for the product or service, to immature, silly, and even nonsensical contributions.
Web 2.0 and the Corporate Need for Programming (aka good stories)
Media creation is not limited to firms in the area of entertainment, news, and sports. Today, manufacturers, from kitchen appliances to toys, are finding they can build, empower, and excite their communities of users with high quality rich media content. In doing so, however, grows a need to manage and control the valuable intellectual property encompassed in this digital media content.
The rapid maturation of digital technologies is now positioning some forward thinking firms to apply truly transformative process and product to media. Video games, for example, have emerged as a category that outsells movie box office -- Nintendo's Wii with its motion sensing controls and inventory of hits, to take just one example, and now a phenomenon with over $300M in sales in its first year.
Advertising is an even bigger prize in the cross-hairs of digital technology suppliers and has been the foundation for media monetization in North America for the last 80 years. The humble 30 second TV ad, the 15 second radio commercial, and the classified newspaper advert, have been the bedrock on which a robust independent and highly diverse entertainment and news industry has risen. While media production, management, and distribution have already been digitized, the traditional manner in which these assets are monetized is beginning to change.
Online ad networks such as Google, Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft are moving towards richer media and integrating sophisticated analytical targeting capabilities. These networks dramatically altered the economics of newspapers and magazines and built an entirely new set of economics around interactive media -- one based on performance, engagement, and actions taken instead of the early models based on simple impressions (CPMs).
Discovery and Interactivity Meet Media, Marketing, and Promotion
Developments in digital media technology enable an explosion in programming choice within the typical home. The majority of households in North America have either cable or satellite TV; and approximately 20% of all households have a digital video recorder (DVR) that allows for one-click time-shifting of programs as well as fast-forwarding. As these DVRs start integrating with home networks and the internet via Web 2.0 technologies, personal photos, videos, and music collections are added to the recorded program selections.
The effect of this dramatic increase in program choice upon consumers is that the act of deciding what to watch is itself a problem -- specifically a problem of navigation (how to move on the screen), search (finding known programs) and discovery (learning about new programs). Many good and not-so-good solutions are, of course, emerging. The latter are often based on paradigms found in productivity related content activities associated with PCs and the internet. Certainly there is much to draw upon from the powerful search systems we use everyday in browsing the Net. The more successful solutions will, however, be those that best fit the social and behavioral environments of TV where viewers know precisely what they want to watch a priori less than 50% of the time. The other half of the time viewers are more likely to browse horizontally, that is follow a thread from one program to another. Information on stars, story, ratings, reviews -- i. e. metadata -- will shape and guide this thread.
Advertising will continue to underpin the economic model for all this content. But it will not be like advertising of the past -- that is interrupt-based advertising, loosely correlated with the type of show and hour at which a viewer may be watching. The average prime-time show today has 17 minutes of commercial advertising time per hour. While, the average advertiser has difficulty measuring the effectiveness of the millions spent during that time. Of course traditional TV advertising does work and will continue for some time, however, an alternative infrastructure emerges today -- one that is fully automated, highly targeted, interactive, and immediately measurable.
Eventually TV content choice will resemble that of the Internet. The almost zero marginal cost and new advertising infrastructure of digital content will allow the economics of the "long tail" to support many new programming choices. Web 2.0 products that enable recommendations and social networking will drive much of the long tail viewing just as it does on YouTube -- though not in real time.
The economics and technology of digital media will enable a dramatic increase in the quality of average programs and in the range of content. This content is not the outcome of a community of private contributors. Rather it is the result of deliberate, well organized, efficient collaboration of content experts, technicians, editors, and sponsors.
Technologies associated with digital media production, collaboration, and distribution have reached a level of maturity that has shifted the basis of competition away from simply performance (can the tool do the job at all), to one based on flexibility, speed, and convenience (how well does the tool integrate with a customer's larger ecosystem of digital media systems -- from capture and storage to rights management and distribution).
The future of (professional digital media) content is much the same as content today. Which is to say that high quality professional content, created by a cohesive collection of authors, editors, and distributors, and supported by an advertising infrastructure will continue to dominate overall volume of video watched -- especially and in particular on TV.
At the same time, digital media technology offerings will dramatically raise both the quantity and quality of content. In lowering the barriers to cost-effective digital workflow and collaboration without regard to geography, this technology enables -- as so many Web 2.0-type technologies do -- new entrants into content production and horizontal expansion of incumbents across media types.
Emergence of this larger pool of high quality programming will not happen over night, but with the right tools and a proper strategy in place now, organizations will be in a better position to manage the influx of content when it arrives.
Digital Asset Management in the Real (Web 2.0) World
So what are companies doing with DAM and Web 2.0? Here are some examples to give you some ideas as to how you can implement this technology in your organization:
Macy's, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, and Mexico's largest broadcasting company Televisa are all very different firms but all preparing for the future world of content via similar and significant investments in Digital Asset Management (DAM). While retailing, computer chip manufacturing, magazine publishing, and television broadcasting suggest distinctly different core competencies, the Web 2.0 digital media trends are such that these companies share many common and increasingly critical media-related workflows including:
• controlling, discovering, and finding media such as images, videos, layouts, PDFs, quickly and intuitively,
• understanding legal parameters of re-use and re-distribution clearly,
• ensuring content is available in the right format for specific devices and networks,
• collaborating with a globally distributed set of users and partners submitting and retrieving content with a wide range of access permissions and roles.
The enabling DAM software is in no case a stand-alone system as may have been the case in years gone by when a virtual filing cabinet was all that was desired. Today, whether Macy's or AMD, Martha Stewart or Televisa, the DAM software is part of a larger set of workflows and systems where tight coupling for performance, reliability, or even basic functionality is not required . Instead new media functionality and capabilities have been created quickly and conveniently through the loose coupling made possible via public interfaces and other modular components and protocols that so well represent the real importance of Web 2.0 as a development worth noticing.
Damian Saccocio is Vice President, Marketing and Product Management,at Artesia, the Digital Media Group of Open Text. He also teaches a course onTechnology Strategy at Georgetown's McDonough School of Business and earnedhis doctorate from Rensselaer's Lally School of Management in Strategy and Technology. He can be reached atDSaccocio@OpenText.com.