By Hannah Johnson
There’s no doubt that technology is now an integral part of creating and delivering content. Media companies are not only working with technology solutions providers and experts, but also building the necessary applications and hardware themselves in order to deliver their content to consumers.
In today’s feature story, Publishing Perspectives reported on the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show and found that media companies are playing a larger role in the hardware industry as consumers expect not just to communicate through their devices but to consume content on them as well.
Does this mean that eventually all media companies will morph into technology companies, become one in the same? Or is it better for content companies to focus on content, and tech companies to focus on tech?
How does your company handle the increased technology requirements of creating and delivering content today?
2 Comments
Yes, publishing is becoming more about technology than content. Our publisher is already swapping ebook catalogs with publishers in China, India, and around the world. We can take entire catalogs from other publishers and put them into Lightning Source/Ingram distribution.. and it’s technology, not content that drives those deals. If I were an author, or a publisher, I would want to know which publisher can get me to the most countries and devices with the least amount of effort and reformatting (that’s why pdf books are going to rule (Google). Robert@PublishOnDemandGlobal.com
Some of the larger publishing houses already develop software and apps in-house, which does put them on the tech side. However, this technology is useless without good content. The real challenge for publishers (and all content providers, for that matter) is deciding how much of their resources to allocate to tech development and how much to focus on producing great content.
Despite all the tech innovations over the last years, content is is more important than the fanciest website or app in terms of building and keeping an audience.