Tuesday, June 15, 2004
My response to "IBM on the Future of Media"
After reading "IBM on the Future of Media", I have compiled a list of my key learnings. I have also written the author of the article in hopes that he can point me to more resources. I look forward to hearing Clint's thoughts on the paper and also talking with Dr. Sova.
1. Success for media companies over the next several years will be dependent on the cost effectiveness of gaining and retaining consumer attention.
2. Consumers will want increasingly customizable media. One implication of this for IJ means finding performers with great ability for audience analysis so they can arrange their performance to suit their audience, or bringing artists together with receptive audiences at low cost.
3. Creating a system that allows for protected access based on access rights with little human intervention round the clock will be key for letting consumers access reserves of low cost "deep" media.
4. Digital technology will become more available to every market segment making it a more and more viable means for content delivery.
5. Successful media companies will partner with others to achieve scale.
6. Allowing users to create and then incorporating their creations digitally will garner attention.
7. Using digital distribution will allow companies to track their customers choices with greater intelligence. Creating an automated system that responds to consumer choices without human intervention to identify higher value assets and promote their delivery, creating an "attention loop", will be a definition of competency. This attention loop will correctly match content and access rights with consumer need and demand.
8. Strategic partnerships will combine their "attention loops".
9. Ten Steps to Becoming an Open Media Company of the Future
1. Create to digital formats
2. Manage content for maximum flexibility
3. Be open for distribution round the clock
4. Be open for delivery - With variable pricing and always-on customer service
5. Open the door for consumers to create their own product
6. Think of new products to make
7. Manage open-book and communicate in real-time through digital infrastructure
8. Use digital technology to know more about your business sooner.
9. Use partnerships to drive efficiency and optimize customer attention.
10. Be come and on-demand business (a business whose costs are mostly variable and whose activity lever corresponds with user interaction).
10. Closed and proprietary media companies (currently represented by most record labels) will give way to open media business strategies allowing forward looking companies to exploit opportunities within those trends.
11. Biometric identification will continue to be used to license digital content.
12. Real estate and labor will fall in importance and cost for media companies.
13. The same content could be purchased for more or less depending on age, sales tracking, promotional schemes, rarity, or other variables.
14. In 2010, some performers and producers will be delivering their product completely free, making money instead for tie-ins, product placements, and Webcast concerts and events.
15. Media companies survive not only on creative content but creative intelligence Ö about markets, customers, delivery, and the value of digital content.
16. New legal status and new popular mindsets will influence how content is delivered. Working with the technology to help people store, archive, access, and retrieve the information they want at a reasonable price will be a winning strategy.
17. Pervasive Media: the end result of digital evolution will be omnipresent media, increased consumer creation and feedback, individualized customization of content with continuously fluctuating and variable value based pricing.
18. The new open market for technology development creates opportunities for new killer applications and content, but it demands flexible responsiveness from media businesses.
19. Including Judas will be catering to the rarest group of non-passive consumers who actively participate in their media choices.
20. There will be twice as many broadband users capable of receiving large data streams by 2007.
21. People will spend 15% more money on media that doesn't exist yet between now and 2007.
22. Digital piracy, ad-skipping, and DVD duplication will continue to put certain media companies under duress into the foreseeable future, but will mainly threaten traditional profit models. Creative profit models working with technology innovations will be relatively unaffected.
23. As choices expand and time remains limited, attention will be an even scarcer commodity. Since technology no longer mandates that content be delivered at certain times only and only to certain platforms, customer responsiveness is the killer application in 2010.
24. The more entertainment choices a person has, the more filters they will put in place and the fewer content providers they will utilize. Media companies will have to shift from a product line focus to a customer focus.
25. Successful media companies in 2010 will not “circle the wagons” around their means of media production. Instead, they will open the up the way they create content, Creating reciprocal relationships with customers and suppliers, the way content is stored, distributed, and separated in to product unit will be opened allow more freedom in combining and reinventing each aspect.
26. When video cassette recorders became popular, studios feared that home viewing would damage their businesses. Eventually, home viewing lead to increased overall consumption of filmed entertainment.
27. The more programming choices a person has (such as more channels on a TV or radio) the fewer they will routinely turn to for very specific, specialized content.
28. Non-traditional music retail outlets will continue to boom at the expense of traditional retail stores.
29. Young downloaders may be deterred by prosecution, but the majority of consumers will remain passive about digital piracy. After years of peddling indecent material, most consumers will be deaf the recording industryÃ’s plea for moral behavior.
30. The problem with the recording industry is not the internet and file sharing. The problem is that the paradigm of hard copy music distribution is “dated as a horse and buggy”.
31. Film piracy will soon be as prevalent as MP3 piracy. Films will be able to edited several different ways with all options put on a DVD. Parents buying a film will have a code allowing them to unlock objectionable content, and also a copy of the film that is “family-safe” without fast-forwarding through shower scenes and profanity.
32. Cometa, a joint venture of IBM, AT&T, and Intel has announced plans to put “wireless internet antennas within five minutes of anyone in the 50 largest US cities.” Cometa has also announced (on May 19) that it is shutting down because investors are pulling the plug, but it made progress and others will follow in its footsteps. http://www.cometanetworks.com/index.shtml
33. There will be attempts to switch from selling copies of content but selling rights to access digital archives of content.
34. The same content must be able to play on almost any different platform.
35. BBC is archiving all its content to digital with plans to share it all via P2P networks.
36. After-the-fact reinforcement of copyright in the form of lawsuits (such as the 2003 legal victory allowing copyright holders to demand ISPs reveal the identities of their users) will never help to grow the entertainment industry and point to a need for embeddedgy imbedded safeguards that keep both sides happy.
37. Steps in bringing content to the media market in 2010:
1. Content is digitally created on converted from analog
2. Content is meta-tagged, indexed, and archived
3. Content is stored on a server accessible to individuals and retailers
4. Universal standards will mean the content is formatted for accessible on any platform
5. "Touchless" systems (24 hour a day accessible with little to no human interaction) will control rights management, bookkeeping, variable pricing strategies and distribution
38. Since strategic focus on attention will be the key to profitability, successful businesses will use new technology to store and analyze all transactions with customers allowing the company to deploy new and archive content to a more selective, cultivated group of fans.
39. Media companies will partner with computing companies outside the media industry to hold their massive archives and make them available for access and distribution, and, just like any business currently relying on an external utility company for electricity, cost will vary with usage.
40. All Including Judas produced content should exist in “platform-universal” digital content, so that it can be part of the ever-rolling attention-loop.
41. Develop deeper data analytics to look at each transaction as guidance for price points.
42. Operate as an "On-Demand” business:
a. Consolidate overhead
b. Integrate Operations
c. Optimize business customer and partner offerings
d. Drive direct-to-customer relationships
e. Prepare for the integrated-media era
43. The customer will remain always right and a profitable media company must work with that sense of entitlement.
1. Success for media companies over the next several years will be dependent on the cost effectiveness of gaining and retaining consumer attention.
2. Consumers will want increasingly customizable media. One implication of this for IJ means finding performers with great ability for audience analysis so they can arrange their performance to suit their audience, or bringing artists together with receptive audiences at low cost.
3. Creating a system that allows for protected access based on access rights with little human intervention round the clock will be key for letting consumers access reserves of low cost "deep" media.
4. Digital technology will become more available to every market segment making it a more and more viable means for content delivery.
5. Successful media companies will partner with others to achieve scale.
6. Allowing users to create and then incorporating their creations digitally will garner attention.
7. Using digital distribution will allow companies to track their customers choices with greater intelligence. Creating an automated system that responds to consumer choices without human intervention to identify higher value assets and promote their delivery, creating an "attention loop", will be a definition of competency. This attention loop will correctly match content and access rights with consumer need and demand.
8. Strategic partnerships will combine their "attention loops".
9. Ten Steps to Becoming an Open Media Company of the Future
1. Create to digital formats
2. Manage content for maximum flexibility
3. Be open for distribution round the clock
4. Be open for delivery - With variable pricing and always-on customer service
5. Open the door for consumers to create their own product
6. Think of new products to make
7. Manage open-book and communicate in real-time through digital infrastructure
8. Use digital technology to know more about your business sooner.
9. Use partnerships to drive efficiency and optimize customer attention.
10. Be come and on-demand business (a business whose costs are mostly variable and whose activity lever corresponds with user interaction).
10. Closed and proprietary media companies (currently represented by most record labels) will give way to open media business strategies allowing forward looking companies to exploit opportunities within those trends.
11. Biometric identification will continue to be used to license digital content.
12. Real estate and labor will fall in importance and cost for media companies.
13. The same content could be purchased for more or less depending on age, sales tracking, promotional schemes, rarity, or other variables.
14. In 2010, some performers and producers will be delivering their product completely free, making money instead for tie-ins, product placements, and Webcast concerts and events.
15. Media companies survive not only on creative content but creative intelligence Ö about markets, customers, delivery, and the value of digital content.
16. New legal status and new popular mindsets will influence how content is delivered. Working with the technology to help people store, archive, access, and retrieve the information they want at a reasonable price will be a winning strategy.
17. Pervasive Media: the end result of digital evolution will be omnipresent media, increased consumer creation and feedback, individualized customization of content with continuously fluctuating and variable value based pricing.
18. The new open market for technology development creates opportunities for new killer applications and content, but it demands flexible responsiveness from media businesses.
19. Including Judas will be catering to the rarest group of non-passive consumers who actively participate in their media choices.
20. There will be twice as many broadband users capable of receiving large data streams by 2007.
21. People will spend 15% more money on media that doesn't exist yet between now and 2007.
22. Digital piracy, ad-skipping, and DVD duplication will continue to put certain media companies under duress into the foreseeable future, but will mainly threaten traditional profit models. Creative profit models working with technology innovations will be relatively unaffected.
23. As choices expand and time remains limited, attention will be an even scarcer commodity. Since technology no longer mandates that content be delivered at certain times only and only to certain platforms, customer responsiveness is the killer application in 2010.
24. The more entertainment choices a person has, the more filters they will put in place and the fewer content providers they will utilize. Media companies will have to shift from a product line focus to a customer focus.
25. Successful media companies in 2010 will not “circle the wagons” around their means of media production. Instead, they will open the up the way they create content, Creating reciprocal relationships with customers and suppliers, the way content is stored, distributed, and separated in to product unit will be opened allow more freedom in combining and reinventing each aspect.
26. When video cassette recorders became popular, studios feared that home viewing would damage their businesses. Eventually, home viewing lead to increased overall consumption of filmed entertainment.
27. The more programming choices a person has (such as more channels on a TV or radio) the fewer they will routinely turn to for very specific, specialized content.
28. Non-traditional music retail outlets will continue to boom at the expense of traditional retail stores.
29. Young downloaders may be deterred by prosecution, but the majority of consumers will remain passive about digital piracy. After years of peddling indecent material, most consumers will be deaf the recording industryÃ’s plea for moral behavior.
30. The problem with the recording industry is not the internet and file sharing. The problem is that the paradigm of hard copy music distribution is “dated as a horse and buggy”.
31. Film piracy will soon be as prevalent as MP3 piracy. Films will be able to edited several different ways with all options put on a DVD. Parents buying a film will have a code allowing them to unlock objectionable content, and also a copy of the film that is “family-safe” without fast-forwarding through shower scenes and profanity.
32. Cometa, a joint venture of IBM, AT&T, and Intel has announced plans to put “wireless internet antennas within five minutes of anyone in the 50 largest US cities.” Cometa has also announced (on May 19) that it is shutting down because investors are pulling the plug, but it made progress and others will follow in its footsteps. http://www.cometanetworks.com/index.shtml
33. There will be attempts to switch from selling copies of content but selling rights to access digital archives of content.
34. The same content must be able to play on almost any different platform.
35. BBC is archiving all its content to digital with plans to share it all via P2P networks.
36. After-the-fact reinforcement of copyright in the form of lawsuits (such as the 2003 legal victory allowing copyright holders to demand ISPs reveal the identities of their users) will never help to grow the entertainment industry and point to a need for embeddedgy imbedded safeguards that keep both sides happy.
37. Steps in bringing content to the media market in 2010:
1. Content is digitally created on converted from analog
2. Content is meta-tagged, indexed, and archived
3. Content is stored on a server accessible to individuals and retailers
4. Universal standards will mean the content is formatted for accessible on any platform
5. "Touchless" systems (24 hour a day accessible with little to no human interaction) will control rights management, bookkeeping, variable pricing strategies and distribution
38. Since strategic focus on attention will be the key to profitability, successful businesses will use new technology to store and analyze all transactions with customers allowing the company to deploy new and archive content to a more selective, cultivated group of fans.
39. Media companies will partner with computing companies outside the media industry to hold their massive archives and make them available for access and distribution, and, just like any business currently relying on an external utility company for electricity, cost will vary with usage.
40. All Including Judas produced content should exist in “platform-universal” digital content, so that it can be part of the ever-rolling attention-loop.
41. Develop deeper data analytics to look at each transaction as guidance for price points.
42. Operate as an "On-Demand” business:
a. Consolidate overhead
b. Integrate Operations
c. Optimize business customer and partner offerings
d. Drive direct-to-customer relationships
e. Prepare for the integrated-media era
43. The customer will remain always right and a profitable media company must work with that sense of entitlement.
