The Question Isn't Where, It's When...

The CTO of a big media company presented me with a challenge recently, which gave new meaning to the word "convergence." I thought I'd use his story to put into context what Sun announced today at JavaOne (what's become the world's largest open source developer conference). First, his business model: his employer was paid every time an item in their content library (say, a new first run movie) was displayed to a user. Independent of whether the user viewed the content on a satellite network, a cable set top box, via DSL on a home PC, through an in-car navigation system or airline seatback (you get the drift, the network is the movie theater). He wanted to reach as many consumers as possible, wherever and whenever he could. That said, for every movie he added to his library, he had to encode the file into a dizzying array of file formats. Some 20 or 30 if he wanted to reach all his audiences - across PCs, phones, set tops, game machines, etc. The format proliferation was costing him a fortune in storage, and the complexity and expense of encoding and decoding the various media streams was driving his computing purchases at an incredible clip. 1,000,000's of subscribers, 10,000's of titles and 100's of devices and file formats - the multi-dimensional matrix was exploding, yet, as he pointed out, delivered no real value to his customers. Customers don't care about movie formats, they care about movies. Reciprocally, adve...

Date: May, 08 2007
Url: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/when_not_where

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