In ten years time, the media industry will be made up of super aggregators and super distributors, at least that’s the opinion of Larissa Görner-Meeus, chief technology officer, Proximus Media House.
She was speaking as part of the panel on TVBEurope and Arqiva’s webinar looking at the future of media distribution, which also included Karl Petermichl, head of distribution, ORF; and Caroline Cardozo, director of product, Arqiva.
The panel were asked where they see the media industry in 10 years. Cardozo said she thinks the industry will look back and ask, why we did we talk about the move to IP for so long?
“We’ll be there and we’ll probably be working out what the next move is,” she added.
“In terms of content, I think there’s going to be more than before in various different formats from content creators that we’ve not even heard of today, and they’ll maybe have more of a global reach than some of the broadcasters and platforms that we know today,” continued Cardozo. “It’ll be super exciting but maybe a little bit scary as well.”
Görner-Meeus agreed with Cardozo, adding, “I hope the industry will have solved the issue of how audiences find what they want to watch at a certain time on any device. [We’ll see] both super aggregation and super distribution. That means content can be easily accessed and enriched with data so much that you can find personalised content – like when you go onto a shopping website that knows what your tastes are.
“There will be way more data and it will become key to finding everything the viewer likes and allow new models of monetisation which will keep us all in the game in the future.”
Petermichl was slightly more pessimistic, particularly around the future of traditional broadcasters.
“I see the broadcast industry slowly dissolving to be honest,” he said. “As Caroline said, we will have many content creators that we don’t know yet.”
Turning to the current state of the industry, the webinar included a poll of the audience who were asked what they view as having the biggest impact on media distribution at the current time.
They were offered four options: personalisation, the on-going adoption of IP, sustainability and piracy/the threat of bad actors.
Personalisation topped the poll with 47.8 per cent of the votes, closely followed by the on-going adoption of IP with 43.5 per cent. Piracy/the threat of bad actors received 8.7 per cent with sustainability not garnering any votes.
The full webinar is available to watch on-demand here.
