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Identity Crisis: Vendors at the
Intersection of Content, Technology and People |
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2 February 2004 |
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In the midst of a raw and blustery New York City winter,
the leaders of the content industry convened at the
SIIA Executive Summit to consider the opportunities that
lie ahead for creating content value in a changing
marketplace. The outlook was mixed at best and complicated
by the domineering presence of technology changes that
continue to make many content companies followers rather
than leaders in defining content value. To gain that
leadership means leaving behind old identities and
labels and adopting identities that flow with the
increasingly dynamic manner in which technology creates
highly valued content today. |
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The
SIIA Executive Summit at New York City's Union League Club was a great assemblage of content
industry talent, including many of both the truly powerful and
the truly visionary leaders of the content marketplace.
The panels were great, keynotes insightful (see
our open-to-close coverage on paidContent.org), the halls
crowded, even the food was good - but the mood of the
participants was at times pretty surly. A conference in New
York during a January snow storm is not necessarily a ticket to
paradise, mind you, but there were other undercurrents at work.
After a few trying years of dot-com boom and bust, changes in
ad spending and institutional budgets, threats from search
engines and new sales models, content vendors seemed to have
wanted at least one brief moment that they could breathe a sigh
of relief and say, "I'm on it." But given the surge of changes
that continue to engulf premium content sales, the phrase more
likely to be heard being muttered under content executives'
breath this year is, "What's next?"
What's next is what many premium content vendors fear: more
of the same. As institutions and individuals learn how to
create, aggregate, deploy and distribute their own content
and content from other sources far more effectively, it's a
continuing challenge to define a high-margin business
proposition based on building and distributing databases.
Technology used to define the essence of the content business'
strength: now it seems to define its weakness, a factor that
seems to be creating an identity crisis of sorts for major
database providers. After a panel
discussion in which she was asked about the impact of
enterprise search and content management products on their
aggregation strategy, Factiva CEO Clare Hart said emphatically, "We're a content company, not a technology
company." In another testy exchange, a major business-oriented
publisher locked horns with an SIIA executive about their
lobbying emphasis on copyright enforcement, an issue near to
the hearts of many media and software companies, but less pressing
to companies that have licensing
models and subscriptions to protect their content database
profits. Yet companies from Microsoft to KaZaa - notably absent
from the summit's proceedings - are only too happy to blur the
lines between content and technology in solving real-world
needs seem to thrive - and don't go very far to help content
companies "get it."
There will always be a place for premium content carefully
culled and sorted in a database, but the SIIA Executive Summit
pointed towards several trends that indicate continuing and
continual change towards models both new and ancient that may
challenge this as the leading value-add model. Here are a few
of the keys to this ongoing identity crisis that surfaced from
presentations and panels:
- Content as a dynamic, community-driven entity.
In his keynote address Martin Nisenholtz, CEO of New York
Times Digital, laid out a vision for online news delivery
predicated on a "new class of creative people" using online
tools such as weblogging and collaborative forums to develop
highly dynamic content whose value in immediacy comes not
from the speed of the machines and circuitry delivering it to
desktops but from the instantaneous and continuous synergies
that come from weaving together databases, personal content
and reportage. If what people call "news" takes on such an
organic form - as it oftentimes does already both on the
public Web and behind firewalls - how do database-oriented
content companies control the value proposition? Some try,
but usually well behind the curve that defines the truest
value of this manner of content development well afar from
their protected content realms.
- The need for truly permanent and universal reference.
Brewster Kahle, Director and Co-Founder of the Internet
Archive, looks at content from the perspective of someone who
both catalogs the history of the Internet and partakes in the
development of the modern Library of Alexandria, a modern
effort to collect a permanent archive of all human knowledge.
Effective archiving of content that's been licensed from a
vendor is becoming a major issue with corporations and other
institutions that need to respond to ever-higher levels of
accountability from authorities. If companies are able to
permanently archive and catalog every piece of content that
they produce effectively and retrieve it on demand, the same
should happen with premium content sources - something that's
difficult for the shifting world of licensing-oriented
content vendors to sustain. With permanent content archiving
and indexing being taken on by Alexandria-style
projects and technology companies squeezing out the value
from the top end of the content equation, some content
vendors may find themselves being little more than experts in
content quality assurance in the long run.
- The many sides of global content. Panelists
contributing to the
"prequel" briefing on global content markets painted a
picture of both risk and opportunity - risk with emerging
economies that are still difficult to rely upon for simple
matters such as reliable payments and currency, opportunities
that their high growth rates and still-untamed public and
private content offer. There are plenty of new arenas in which to
redeploy old business models. But as many of these emerging
economies start "day one" with the latest cost-effective
content technologies and nations such as India provide
abundant and cost-effective data processing to increase
competitiveness and decrease potential margins, the time
frame in which these markets can be exploited effectively
with tried and true techniques may be quite limited. Global
economies mean global standards, standards which are likely
to make more content available in easy-to-use forms more
abundantly than ever before - regardless of its origin..
The most foresightful leaders of the content industry showed
at the conference that they are grappling with these trends and
working mightily to create companies that leave behind as much
of the old baggage as possible and add value to information and
experiences through every means available. The question is
whether companies without this baggage will get to the best new
opportunities before they do. When it gets cold outside keep
moving, or it will be colder before you know it.
-
John Blossom
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