Content starts here
The communication and media industry is trying to keep pace with an evolving digital media explosion. Companies such as broadcasters, broadband and new media players are all trying to capitalize on the explosive and profitable digital media industry. With the introduction of new media services like next generation video across various platforms, the digital media workflow is driving innovation and mandating that companies keep up to compete or lose.
Based on recent Frost and Sullivan research, “Despite the global recession and longer sales cycles, the Digital Media market has been surviving very well. Growth rates for individual markets within the ecosystem vary but are still projected to grow at a very respectable overall market average of between five and 10 percent over 2009.”
Unfortunately, with the rapid growth, most telecom, cable, satellite and broadcast companies are not positioned well to thrive in the lucrative environment. They have costly and slow manual processes for combining their technologies across inefficient, siloed, disparate proprietary technologies. And, they have difficulties accessing and monetizing that content. Broadcasters have additional specific challenges like:
- Geographically dispersed operations which amplify manual and unlinked process deficiencies
- Difficulties accessing and monetizing content
- Manual tape exchange for legacy technologies
New Media Aggregators are wholesalers that buy and resell content. They are moving to digital end-to-end, IT network based workflows. And New Media Distributors are service providers providing content, distributed over IP networks such as YouTube. Also in this group are telco operators providing internet TV and live video-streaming and mobile operators providing live and on-demand video-streaming over 3G. Their challenges are similar to broadcasters, but additional obstacles include:
- Inability to manage explosion of unstructured content
- Requirements to distribute into multi formats
- Challenges of New Media supply chain as business models weren’t built for digital distribution
- Chaos and costs of migration from paper contracts and tapes to digital delivery formats required by their customers
In the Frost and Sullivan white paper, “Digital Media: Delivering on the Promise,” the report says that content providers are rapidly trying to deliver the digital content that the consumers demand and expect. However, despite their best efforts, “Many companies still struggle with the adoption of a digital media workflow tool. Workflows can be very sophisticated, depending on content volume and industry - workflows of broadcasters, broadband providers and Web-based new media providers can all vary significantly”.
HP recommends three steps to implement a digital media workflow:
Step one can help a company assure quality and increased productivity across their media lifecycle. The goal is to help eliminate the cost of lost or misplaced work and to provide a holistic view of both automated and manual processes currently being used. Next, automate those processes and streamline manual processes for better operational efficiency. Lastly, companies should manage the proliferation of user-generated content from the emerging class of ‘quasi’ professionals.
In this industry, “time is of the essence” as they say. Companies should speed the time to market from content ingestion to distribution through increased workflow efficiency via a platform and solution agnostic approach based on service-oriented architecture (SOA). According to the Frost and Sullivan report, “SOA allows a better alignment of IT with business goals while allowing for the maximum reuse of IT assets. Not only can SOA-based point solutions be spread horizontally across the workflow from ingest to distribution, but they can also provide critical functions at the micro-level.” With a SOA-based foundation, you can adapt easily to workflow changes flexibly while increasing revenue generation potential with easy access and retrieval of content.
In today’s volatile environment, companies must be positioned to react to market dynamics. In fact, while difficult to do, they should almost anticipate the competitors’ next moves. With an improved digital media workflow, a company can enable a faster response to nimble competitors. Once you overcome the various media lifecycle bottlenecks and transform into a source of business flexibility and competitive advantage, you can ensure continuity of operations and flexibility to add new processes into the business workflow.
With HP’s solutions, we provide a modular approach, not a monolithic approach. You don’t need to adapt your business needs to our solution… our solution adapts to your business needs. The Media Workflow Master solution is enabling technology that helps you integrate and streamline the entire media lifecycle value chain across isolated departments and organizations. HP Media Workflow Master monitors and tracks both automated and manual activities helping drive down re-work costs and inefficient workflows. The design ensures integration with existing and future environments without compromising existing assets.
HP’s Media Control is a solution family that enables effective and efficient monitoring and delivery of content. At the workflow level in the Media Control solution family, HP provides the HP Control Room solution and the HP Traffic Control solution. These are point solutions built using SOA-based technology to integrate with current operations thereby enabling better quality of experience and scheduling of content.
According to Frost and Sullivan’s report, “HP has married its domain expertise in the Communications, Media and Entertainment space across its professional services and product groups to provide point-solutions as well as system integration through a holistic approach.”
Learn how HP can help you or download the Frost and Sullivan report to learn more about the Digital Media revolution.
