Online Media Production

When you start companies, you often run into naming problems. First is the name of the company itself. Then the name of the products and product features. Think of the plethora of terms that didn't exist ten years back for Internet services: "pop-up", "spam", "AJAX", "Google", "web-enabled email client", "IMAP", "mash-up", "podcast", "Blackberry", and on and on.

As more and more media moves to the Internet, I've been looking at changes in media production tools. Most professional media production takes place on computers these days, using products like Adobe Photoshop or Apple Final Cut.

An emerging idea is that, as more and more content assets migrate to the Internet, media production tools also will migrate to the Internet. Today, though, if you search for "online media production", though, you end up with computer based production products like this. You run right into the naming problem. Inconveniently, the term "online media production" describes precisely media production tools that have migrated to Internet services, but according to the search engines that term means something different.

Most of the Internet photo services like flickr and picasa have simple media production tools, mostly for organizing and feeding photos rather than manipulating images. Here's a video on flickr that shows, for instance, ways that photo assets can be incorporated in slide shows and blogs.



If you search on using flickr or using picasa on YouTube, you'll find many more ways that people are using these online photo services for media production.

SoundStreak is an example of a company that provides online media production services. SoundStreak provides Internet Recording Studio services that move recording sessions out of physical studios and on to the Internet. It uses smart caching of recorded video and audio assets to enable real time interaction between producer, director, and voice talent over the Internet. Services like SoundStreak's will reduce significantly the time, travel, and cost associated with media production.

For the next year or two, most media production will continue to take place on computers. Expect our language (and search engine results) about media production to change as more of these production tools migrate to the Internet.


Update: Someone at HP must have read this post!

HP plans to leverage Tabblo's technologies to make printing from the web easier and more convenient than it is today. Tabblo's technology allows people to simply and efficiently arrange and print text, graphics and photos from the web. This is made possible by Tabblo's custom template engine, using an AJAX-enriched interface. -- tabblo.com