GENIUS INTERVIEW Stuart Almond
STUART ALMOND: There was always a vision or ambition of where we thought the world could go. And every time you saw the elements of new technology, you thought about where it might take you. Maybe it was the idea that cloud is coming and people are going to stop using on- premises infrastructure and go to a shared resource, or that fewer and fewer people are going to watch televised TV, because you’ll be able to watch content through different devices wherever you are. What’s surprising is not what we can achieve with technology, but the speed of that change. Only a few years ago, we were saying, “Yeah, within the next three to five years, more people will be accessing content over mobile than ever before” – and, bang, it’s within one year. Or, “Over the next few years, more and more people will start to use cloud and realise they don’t need as much on-premises stuff.” And again, it’s been half of the time we predicted. So I think it’s not necessarily predictions that change, but the speed at which they’ve become reality that has surprised me – pleasantly, I guess. The other thing is the change from what used to be seen as a professional, traditional industry to the need to be agile and flexible and working on intuition. And
see how innovation took us to this world of second screen, and social media, and then virtual reality and augmented reality, and then 5G on top of that as well. And part of my journey at Sony has been the introduction of cloud of virtualised services and where frontier takes us. I started as a journalist and now I’m in a very fortunate and privileged position where I get to be spokesperson for a brand like Sony, and talking about really what the future of journalism could be, and where do we go next.
your computer at that point. The excitement of what was possible there led me to working at a global systems integrator called Mediasmiths, which took the first UK broadcaster completely tapeless working with broadcasters like Sky, which was the first European broadcaster to go tapeless in the early 2000s. You’re talking about a commodity these days with media asset management systems, but a lot of broadcasters and entertainment companies back then were still relying on tape and very linear processes. Now there was this world where all of a sudden everything could be digitised and content could be pushed and used in very different ways. It became a completely different world. FEED: What would you say have been the biggest surprises as you’ve watched this technological change taking place?
FEED: What was this new digital transition like?
STUART ALMOND: You were no longer restricted by that limited number of terrestrial channels or (what then became) subscription services for cable or satellite TV. You had this opportunity to watch and engage with content globally – through
TECHNOLOGY SHOULD ALWAYS BE USED TO ENABLE US TO BEMORE HUMAN
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