Media Outsourcing Big Opportunity:More Insight

Last week, I had written about the big opportunity in Media outsourcing and I received a few mails on whether I can expand on this opportunity and give more insights. I am not an expert by any means but my current profession requires me to have a broader understanding of the new concepts and opportunities. So I thought to do a bit of research on this. Here it goes.

Media Outsourcing is not a new word by any means and many bloggers have written about it. What I would try and do is to explain two key words/Technologies relevant to Media outsourcing- Digitization and content repurposing. I believe understanding these terms would also help in understanding the opportunity, I mentioned in my previous post.

Digitization

Our World is a humongous store of books, articles, research papers, movies, Audio tapes etc etc which are in analogue or Print format. The problem with Analogue content is that it is pretty difficult and costly to maintain them and thereby their life is short. The other problem with analogue content is finding information or searching through it. In the context of Media companies, the story remains the same. The TV or Media companies own existing contents in Analogue format. Now look at it from our perspective, we would like to see News items, discussions, movies, celebrity events or interviews, celebrity footage and what not of the past for whatever reasons. So there is an opportunity for the Media companies to offer such contents to the public and increase viewership (which is what the game is all about).

Secondly, making these contents searchable is of paramount importance so that content of choice can be easily found. So, what is Digitization? Digitization is the technique of converting Analogue contents to a digital format and Meta-tagging them. Tagging is generally used to link key words to content so that relevant part can be searched easily and in quick time. Most of the search engines and Wiki use these tags and not to forget the Bloggers etc. Worldwide, serious successful efforts have been made. I will list a few of them (This list is complete by no means):

Library of books, Journals etc
Google Books
Project Gutenberg
The Perseus Digital Library

Library of Heritage and Cultural literature

Collaborative Digitization Program
NC ECHO - North Carolina Exploring Cultural Heritage Online

Entertainment

Internet Movie Database, Now acquired by Amazon.com

Internet Library

Archive of Web and Multimedia resources

Some of the renowned universities across the world are also putting in their effort. Now coming to another related key word, once the contents are digitized, it has to be preserved and that is called digital preservation. There are two fundamental reference works for the digital preservation:

Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS)
Attributes of a Trusted Digital Repository (TDR)

More Information on this can be found in the following links:

Moving Theory into Practice: A digital imaging tutorial
Digital Preservation Management: Implementing Short-term strategies for long-term problems

Content Re-purposing

The Media companies generate a lot of content which is suitable for Television audience and to an extent can be viewed on PCs. But in today's world there are number of mediums which are used extensively by people to access content which are interesting to them. The case in point is Mobile phones and the ring tones of music. The ring tones are examples of content repurposing but this is just the simplest example. In the larger context, any content developed for television or owned by television companies can be made available to the people having access to other devices like Mobiles phones, PDAs etc. Imagine watching Shakira's "Hips dont Lie" Video, Gibbs’ six sixes in an over , Mayawati’s post victory speech, LIVE Ash-Abhi saat phere etc on your handset on the move and on demand . This is a huge opportunity for Software as well as Media companies to explore and that's what NDTV and TV18 intend to do.


So, what is content repurposing? Simply put, it means using methods or techniques to develop contents or modify contents in order to make them available for more than one delivery medium. However it is also influenced by many other factors such as user age and gender, types of activities, time availability, and prior knowledge of the subject matter. Developing content for every device, network, usage and their combinations is almost impossible task. Content repurposing addresses these variables by taking content designed for a particular platform and automatically repurposing it to suit another. In content repurposing a single copy of the content is maintained in its original form and repurposed it to fit the desired scenario in automated fashion.

Further reading

Content Repurposing of Slide presentation
Content repurposing
Multimedia Content Repurposing
Digital Interactive Video Exploration and Reflection

I hope this post will be useful to some.

~Cheers
Abhishek