There is an opportunity to exploit a new low-cost global market presence in the area of digital media management and intrinsically create a new service industry, enabled by a suite of established digital technologies, which we shall refer to as ‘Digital Media Store and Forward’ (DMS) The services of this new industry will enable the management and delivery of multiple forms of mass entertainment or core data products, to move from point to multi-point more efficiently than ever before.

Currently a sea-change regarding data storage and location dependency is taking place. The ‘insurance’ of data in the aftermath of terrorist activities in the past few years has not only become sensible to relocate critical data centers but also to consolidate the approach to the requirements of media content and data storage.

This is in effect what compliments the business processes in the rich media and general media bases that require massive amounts of inexpensive storage. Conventional routes into this domain are vastly overpriced and overcomplicated – they all are born from the exaggerated financial and banking data markets that require high resilience and integrity – they are also 20 years out of date!

The Global Market for Digital Media Store and Forward
Many of the processes involved and outlined with content creation, distribution, delivery and consumption of any type are migrating from a historical analogue environment to a new environment will be based entirely on digital principles and practices.

We are seeing the global deregulation of telecommunications driving the migration from analogue voice traffic to bulk digital data traffic. The UK is at the leading edge in the adoption of digital television and a natural storage path is slowly, albeit painfully, emerging.

Major computer and telecoms corporations are still making significant investments in media and cable interests in an attempt to second-guess where the convergence of mass entertainment will end up. Out of this sea of doubt and uncertainty, some fundamental truths remain:

• The mass audience has no interest at all in content delivery systems. They will only pay for content value.

• As the ‘Channels’ of entertainment delivery proliferate, rights holders are becoming more, not less, empowered to turn rights into revenue.

• Businesses driving or closely involved with such industry moves towards maximising rights value have a bright future as the eventual migration to an entirely digital media environment approaches.

In essence, the service will enable a media content rights holder to maximise their revenue potential, without regard to the type of those rights, while minimising costs and eliminating risk in both the short and longer terms.

While the core enabling technological systems are currently available to all who understand them in sufficient detail, true commercial value can only be realised from such systems with a clear understanding of the target market, combined with the application of significant economies of scale.

Therefore this business service is based around delivering substantial and scalable capacity on large-scale systems to high value clients who are unable to make technological commitments of this type or magnitude.

The technical platform for the enterprise is based on mass digital library storage and computer file servers, enabling the seamless storage and management of many tens of thousands of hours of television material and its associated metadata.

Key Business Drivers – Revenue Streams

• The long term value of the world’s analogue & digital media back catalogue

• The industry wide migration to new electronic acquisition and production for film and television VOD, Internet broadcasting, ‘Me-TV’, intelligent agents and other ‘pull’ technologies

• Increased broadband interactive services to the home

• The advent of next generation ‘broadband’ mobile phones, and their rich content requirements

• Conventional paper based companies (Legal, Banking, Insurance etc) can improve efficiency by ingesting documents, contracts and other legal forms into an efficient unified database control function.

All the above developments will require availability of mass storage and delivery services. This is a key component to the rationalisation that directly relates to the development of the new model.

Key Opportunities

• A corporate investor, able to see the value proposition

• Access to bulk global network bandwidth and capitalisation

• Access to local connectivity

• Access to local R&D and other business process resources

• Potential Revenue Streams - Digital Media Store & Forward Solutions

• Access to a competent skills base

Rights Risk Management

It is worth considering the risk management strategy of the world’s media groups. At the moment, the legal rights to a given piece of content does not recognise that content exists on physical media, be it film, tape or photographic print.

The expectation of revenue from, content will remain long after the media upon which it exists has deteriorated over time and the content falls below saleable quality. Physical media is also at measurable risk from natural disasters, such as fire, flood or earthquake.

The only risk management strategy achieved to date is the creation of multiple copies of content, combined with geographical separation of those copies. However, a policy of risk containment based on creation of duplicates doesn’t take account of the fact that analogue copies are not perfect replicas of their originals and incur ‘generation loss’, the creation of copies incurs even faster physical wear on original masters, and that operation of such a system incurs significant management overheads.

The UK Government has recently tightened regulations on corporate governance which will require UK quoted companies to make risk assessment and management part of a company’s annual reporting. Indeed European directives also endorse this directive if not more so.

In circumstances such as these, There is a world wide market for provision of digital content archiving services, solving for the client both rights future proofing (copying in a digital environment is entirely lossless) as well as removing the possibility of total loss of content and reducing the associated consequential loss premiums. Once again, it should include an address to this lucrative market with the application of digital store and forward techniques.

Distribution

The traditional way to expedite programme sales is to physically ship copies of the material. This is less than optimal for a number of reasons:

• There is a significant delay in transit, with customs procedures forming a major part of International shipping time.

• There is risk during transit to the copies.

• There is additional wear and tear on master copies for the creation of duplicated copies, both digital and analogue.

• Subsequent sales are to some degree subject to timely returns by the customer.

• Management of the distribution process is complex and costly.


Distribution

However, if a rights holder was able to ship first generation copies relatively quickly, at low cost and with zero risk across international borders securely, their associated costs whether tangible or otherwise would fall. While the real strength of this argument lays in the existence of multiple storage sites, it is not planned at this stage to do so. Construction at some later point will hold out the potential of seamless low cost distribution as a ‘value add’ to the core offering.

Digital Cinema

There are early industry moves towards ‘all-electronic’ cinema production, distribution and consumption. Although the current volume of such material is not great, it is clear that greater adoption of this new method will require large digital storage capacities seamless distribution in the market. The system proposed would be well placed to take advantage of this shift in the industry.

The UK Film Council has recently announced plans to equip 250 screens (c150 cinemas) across the UK for digital cinema to enable ‘geographic equality’ of access to film releases.

Broadcast TV Transmission

It is fairly common knowledge that the European broadcast television industry is going through profound change. The proliferation of both TV channels and delivery platforms over the last decade, is as ever, challenging not only the consumer, but even more so the business models of the channels themselves as they adapt to commercial pressures.

Broadcast TV Transmission Cont.

Channels competing for narrowing audience share must look very hard at their cost base, and options for reducing costs will always be considered carefully. As a direct result of many years experience in this field, it is felt that any enterprise that is indicated in this document must have the ability to supply a platform for TV channel provision, through to transmission services.

This offering of shared capacity on a large system, will deliver greater third party cost savings than can be realised even by operating internal dedicated facilities. In this manner, it will be possible to complement the existing market for provision of transmission services, since it will be aiming at the market section that may not be able to afford to use custom built facilities.

Therefore as part of the services mix, it is very easy is to offer highly cost effective multi-channel TV transmission based service supply factors based again on the same core technologies within the core storage elements. Again this can be accommodated at later date.

Broadcast TV Disaster Recovery

It is worth noting that there are also a number of considerably better-resourced channels to whom baseline operational cost is not the primary issue, but protecting existing revenue is. To businesses such as these, the commercial provision of disaster recovery transmission facilities would be an attractive option. Currently, No-one in the global market is able to provide high quality cost effective disaster recovery facilities for broadcasters. It could be reasonably addressed to the currently open market.

VOD Storage

While the business of VOD and other demand led services is still embryonic, it still contains some promise. Currently it has yet to prove itself as a reliable cost effective revenue stream! Interests in the connectivity process necessary to present such services to the home, is well tuned to a market for offline content storage for cable companies and generally to Telco’s who wish to develop in that area.

Web Casting

The storage systems lend themselves well to clients wishing to develop web based media businesses. It is not the intention to deploy streaming/web delivery servers within the enterprise, but could easily store and forward entertainment or other content to clients in that arena.

Some pre- or mis- conceptions still exist about the viewing experience via the web portal and this is certainly true for the family viewing habits. However, it is still not to be overlooked and as the web evolves further, it must be accommodated at all levels of content handling as this will become the single most important portal for everyone.

Paper Ingestation

Business processes that contain high levels of paper or document storage can be accommodated and processed just as easily for that of the general media owner. This would use several formats that a common database search engine would be best suited for and or intelligent data processing techniques that can search to a very fine accuracy of levels for duplication, matching and or general research capabilities.

The level of sophistication in various well-known manufacturers of photocopying devices can easily slot into the main operational requirements of the system and be linked to the core database engine that is proposed. The same ingest engine (IMS) can and should schedule this workflow pattern the same as for tape-based products.

Broadcasters Outline

The prime basis for this outlined business model and impressions of a financial return are associated with acquired knowledge on content creation, processing, distribution and storage from the broadcast sector that will enable companies to significantly reduce costs.

The other main point is that due to general pressures in the media market place at the moment and financial constraints endorses that there are reduced funds to invest in solutions that can mimic this outlined proposal. It is the intent therefore, to make this obvious to all potential clients as well as endorsing the view that it is primarily a ‘Non- Core’ activity to their respective businesses!

The third statement is derived from the very nature of leveraged assets and that is of generating or providing New Revenue Streams through the exploitation of the medium of electronic interchange models that exist and that will exist in the future.

A generalisation exists in all of these domains above of course but with some slight variations. On the whole, the modeling should be workable across all organisations that produce content. This makes assumptions therefore, on or about the associated costs involved in each case but the figures that are analysed from previously investigated profiles, indicate a significant saving to each business. This estimates a margin of between 20% to 40%, potential real cost savings on operations, within this outline.

Furthermore, due to the new leveraged content position of this model, further financial savings can be made in terms of the processing and distribution power that will be established once the content is ingested into the archive system and then published to the client.

This will mean continued cost savings to the client and further ‘hidden’ revenue streams to the enterprise on a contract-by-contract basis. This will be primarily in the form of consultancy fees and bureau type services as well as applying a rate card payment style system across and above the SLA.

Summary

This text is proposed to inspire the reader into thinking around another way of simplifying the storage model and presenting a solution that can bear fruit it terms of a real storage solution and provide investors with a valued return. The bi-product is a unified and cohesive set of tools for the archivist to work with and start helping the growing mountain of media and that of which is at risk from decay.

I need funding for this project but everywhere I go with the idea I get the same response back – Great idea but what have you got to show for it and who are you anyway…what have you done to make me sit up and listen…track record…blah blah!

No organisation can see the upside on this due to their own self-indulgent and inward thinking so-called house experts. They are all stuck in the same time-warp as their assets are and cannot or will not make changes to their business models due to the backward thinking of annual fiscal policies and insistant of using poorly informed IT professionals on tackling a mounting problem.

In most cases now I am seeing more and more mergers of corporations, high turnover of CEO’s and poor investor returns, that in most cases sees the business shrinking and or going bust before they can turn around their assets to profit. This is criminal!