NEURAL NETWORK DPP events bring senior tech professionals together
The supplier base for technology is going to diversify. There’s pro AV, but also because we’ve got a very diversified and distributed form of content creation, we’re going to get this diversification of vendors to fit that market. There are going to be a lot of blurred boundaries between what we think historically as professional media technology and what we might have thought of as being consumer or prosumer technology – and exactly where those boundaries sit is going to be difficult to define, but we know it has to happen. This is the painful truth for media organisations. Consumers want aggregation. If consumers could have one subscription to access everything you could possibly want to watch on one device, a single monthly fee – if you offer that to consumers tomorrow – everyone would take it. All we’re going through right now is a period of resistance. We don’t know quite how long it’s going to last. We don’t know what it’s going to take for it to get broken. In the meantime, we’re talking a lot about re-bundling. We’re talking a lot about aggregators of different kinds, whether they’re aggregating apps or whether they are true aggregators like YouTube. But either way, that’s a historical force in play and everything should, in my view, be measured against that reality. Related to that is the advertising market, which is
also getting highly distributed, and the way that operates in an internet- led world is going to define what happens to many of the established media organisations. The historic linear advertising model is not yet completely broken and gone, but it’s going to crumble – and so will our ability to follow the ad dollars and where they are going. That is going to be the kind of signal that I think shows us where change is going to happen, and why. How does all of this apply to the DPP itself? And how will it keep itself fit for the future? We can’t sit still for a moment. I think you know that in any organisation,
particularly once it has achieved a certain age and achieved a certain scale, it becomes quite natural for everybody involved to become very attached to what you’ve become, to the way you do things. It takes a lot of willpower and determination to keep on questioning yourself every single day and asking, are we still relevant? Are we still delivering the things that media organisations need – because, if we’re not, then why ever should they be DPP members? The key thing to know about the DPP is that it will not look the same in one year’s, two years’, three years’ time as it did a year or two before. And if that’s the case, then we must be doing something right.
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