The Future Of The Media Software Industry: An Insider's Perspective
Posted by Atex Blog on Thu, Mar 11, 2010
Many people in the media industry ask what the future looks like. Certainly nobody knows, but a solution might be easier to see than we think. In fact it might be right in front of our eyes. Think for a moment of all the things you do with your computer: You can watch movies, watch live feeds, read the news, listen to music, and a variety of other things. Similar functionality is found with your mobile. These devices are integrating many things into one single package.
Like a computer or mobile device, media companies are asked to provide numerous services from the same package. They have to produce a variety of content for different channels, like paper or online, in different ways, like radio and television, plus they need tools to track circulation, advertising and data mining. It would be wonderful to have a tool to do all these jobs, but like any user of a Swiss Army knife knows; it can do many things, but not any of them particularly well.
As users in any part of a media organization will tell you, they need exceptional solutions to solve their particular needs. But as some users have found, these exceptional solutions often don’t work well together as information feeders or receivers. There is often a need to develop cumbersome interfaces to make these solutions talk to each other.
INTEGRATION/INTEROPERABILITY/ADAPTABILITY
So what’s the future? How can we achieve the things that the customers will want in the future; things like Integration, Interoperability and Adaptability. Well the future may very well be in front of us—we just need to look at our own personal computer. It achieves these three things in one device. You have the integration of programs for music, movies, word processing, etc., which interoperate and allow us to create presentations from recorded audio files, saved images, spreadsheets, and other documents produced by separate tools. Finally there is adaptability—a PC has programs and tools you want and use; we can choose the locality that suits us and the way we want to arrange them on our desktop.
So how does the media industry achieve the same type of results as a PC? We need an operating system. The operating system for media companies would provide the hub where all the tools (programs) and solutions attach. It would also handle the communication between tools and other system (like and ERP), and manage the system’s objects (files). Objects in this case include a story, an image, a page, an ad, a circulation route, a customer etc.
But you may wonder: Aren’t we just adding another piece of software to the glut of software we already operate? Though this might not seem like the ideal solution, the advantages of such a scenario offset the disadvantages of keeping the status quo. To mention a few: For customers, an operating system allows them to pick and choose what they want without having to buy a complete solution. For developers to achieve interoperability they do not need to be aware of what other developers are doing, it’s just a matter of talking to the operating system. Other vendors can hook-up other types of products to the systems. Localization and some customization can be done in the operating system that will spread to all the tools that are connected to it.
It’s like the difference between a rock band and symphony orchestra. A rock band’s small size allows it to play great music without a conductor organizing each instrument. But with an orchestra, this is simply not the case. As the complexity rises, the orchestra needs a conductor to coordinate the performance.
Submitted by Aparicio Bernal, Application Engineer