What Media Distributors Think About
by Robert Bell
Las Vegas, Nevada, May 1, 2012--Bright lights. Big crowds. Penn & Teller, Circe de Soleil and showgirls wearing costumes that would make their grandfathers blanch. If it’s April, it must be NAB in Las Vegas. This year’s NAB was interesting to me as much for what it was notabout as for what it covered. In past shows, there has usually been a Big Idea that you could escape only by keeping both eyes closed. The last couple of years, it was 3D. Before that, it was HD. But this year, it was…all of the above. Over-the-top, mobile TV, 3D, HD, what have you. The strong impression I developed was that nobody knows what the heck is going to happen next, which I think is a true reflection of what is going on in the media business.
That made it a good time for talking with the people who are responsible for getting media content to its final destination. As distribution becomes increasingly complicated, content owners turn to them for solutions. How does a media executive ensure that one piece of content can cost-effectively and securely reach all of the devices in all of the markets when it is hard to predict exactly what those devices and markets will be? They either need to invest unlimited funds – not likely in an industry undergoing severe financial pressure – or find partners who can help them stay ahead of the curve. Content distribution providers are those partners, who can spread the technology and infrastructure costs across enough customers to make the business case work.
For two days on the show floor, we conducted video interviews with senior executives of content distribution companies, both service providers and technology pioneers. They talked about the burning issues of the business, and how their companies were responding. They spoke about the changing priorities of their customers in the media industry, and tried to predict what we will be talking about three years from now at the 2015 NAB Show.
We spoke, among others, with Bill Tillson, COO of Encompass Digital Media, who has built a remarkable content distribution business spanning the globe. We heard from Joel Ledlow, CEO of ScheduAll, which has grown from a scheduling system into a workflow management tool underpinning production and distribution for thousands of companies. Itzik Wulkan, the founder and CEO of NovelSat, talked about the company’s revolutionary compression technology. Crystal Solutions CEO Roger Franklin spoke of new advances in the battle against satellite RFI. And that is just a sample of what’s available at www.youtube.com/WorldTeleport.
After watching the interviews, one thing becomes clear. The content distribution business is not about to get any simpler or any easier. But managing rising complexity as business models evolve is likely to be a good business for years to come.
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Robert Bell is Executive Director of the World Teleport Association, which represents the world's most innovative teleport operators, carriers and technology providers in 20 nations. He can be reached at: rbell@worldteleport.org
