This is an excerpt of a business plan I wrote in 2007. It provides an analysis of the Australian TV Content Media Industry.
The business plan was developed to source funding for the development, and establishment of an open-standard, operational platform for DVB and IP Delivered Content, to TV. These proposed systems incorporated all such aspects end-to-end, including content production, content storage, content security, content distribution and content display. The principle area of work surrounded advertising supported content.
This proposal cuts across a group of industry sectors, however, the profit drivers were based upon advertising, media and telecommunications.
For years, industry leaders have been discussing “convergence” and its effects on a range of industry segments as internet protocol becomes the leading format for information communications networks, and compounds in the number of formats or types of information made compatible and transferred across such networks.
This has lead to a boom in telecommunications revenue opportunities and core business associations to the rest of the community. It has also provided new opportunities for growth and has developed to provide a leadership role in the growth of new economies, and related intellectual property capitalisation.
A problem incurred through such ubiquitous compatibility, is a degradation of the organically positioned stepping stones, incurred by operations that did not involve telecommunications as a foundation for business growth. Telecommunications have broadened their cross-section of economical effect, to an extent whereby almost no business can operate without payment to telecommunications businesses. This has incurred a dramatic change in parity and IP capitalisation drivers, harboured by companies that traditionally monetised other formats, that are now “compatible with internet”, for distribution purposes…
The telecommunications industry has not successfully developed security measures to protect business from risks associated to the operation of their core business. Whereas in pre-internet markets parties were required to obtain physical copies of materials prior to replication, internet does not require such precursors. In fact, one physical copy can be “enabled” onto the global telecommunication network for replication. The only party, who will, in all cases, make direct revenues from this process, is the telecommunications industry.
Beneficially, this platform enables global, free speech and low-cost distribution of ideas, concepts and other intellectual property. The iTV Company aims to purport a specification for this platform, calling it HTTP internet, whilst segregating and opening opportunities for other market segments to utilise the same infrastructure to support their key business drivers in an economical manner.
This, in media terms, is Intellectual Property (“IP”). Although the acronym is used in a similar format to Internet Protocol (“IP”), the terms actuate very different things in terms of economics.
In internet terms; Intellectual Property values the information, made possible through interpretive publication of data.
Whether it be media, financial, medical, social, corporate, government other personal information there are intellectual property associations to such “data”, that are and should be valued at a different rate to the cost of transacting the data asset.
This has not been implemented in the foundation for the internet networks. In fact, internet networks, and the telecommunications companies who operate such networks, take very little responsibility for any data that is transferred over their commercial services, the appropriation of such data in information format to recipients and/or the commercial model in which the data was transacted on an information level.
Televisions sit in our lounge rooms and are family orientated devices. They have been developed and continually used as a format of social communications, governed by local social decisions of content suitability and access-form. It is seemingly important to attempt to adapt the new technology, around the social principles that have been established through precedent.