Ubiquitous broadband network connections and digital devices that permeate every situation of daily life will allow people to use information, communication and services at work, at home and on the move, says a report by one of the world’s leading organisations for the newspaper and media industries.
The report by Ifra says that the most important changes in the media value chain in the future will occur around the customer. “Intuitive multimodal interaction through personalised, situation and context aware services will let users focus on content instead of technology. Background information about every selected piece of content will be readily available when broadcast media, interactive Internet, communication channels and services grow together.”
The report, “The Future Development of Media and Communication Technology”, is the third in the series titled “Where NEWS?”, Ifra’s research project on the future of news media launched in March last year. Ifra’s research initiative, scheduled to run for at least three years, is backed by over EUR 1 million of funding.
So, where does news figure in all this? The report says, “The amount of information accessible via Internet will continue to grow due to a significant increase in home-made and user-generated content in the vain of Web 2.0. Motivated by the upcoming simplicity of publishing information online, plans for digitisation of current paper content and larger storage capacities, an inflation of information value has to be expected. Uncertainty about validity, authenticity and usage rights of user generated content will further compromise the value of information. Consumer demand for valuable information will consolidate this trend and show the importance of high quality journalistic work.”
The report points out that the availability of personal computers, data networks as well as mobile computing and communication, has dramatically changed the way people communicate, entertain and inform themselves. “Internet based services have become established as new channels in addition to the traditional media of newspapers, radio and television. “
In the next few years, the Ifra report predicts, the Internet will increasingly change traditional media, influencing every stage of the media value chain. Content generation and aggregation as well as production technologies, distribution channels and media consumption will evolve. “A set of major technology trends can be extracted from historical and current developments as well as from current R&D roadmaps of major technology companies and research institutes.”
Production technology will adapt to customers’ changing demands. Users will act as part of a media-centred community. They will communicate with other community members and even significantly contribute to content production themselves. Content production will become more user-centric. Tools for content generation and media production will have to incorporate means to realise this trend.
“As content production becomes easier, information transfer speeds up and storage capacities grow exponentially, a true inflation of information will occur, leading to an increasing need to assess, select and authenticate media input. New tools for extracting relevant, validated and legal information will be available to filter a variety of information channels and sources,” the report says.
The authors – Christine Daun, Dietmar Dengler, Peter Fettke, Torben Hansen, Christian Hauck – identified a set of major trends in future information technology in the media industry:
- Ubiquitous computing in a broadband world,
- Consumers becoming collaborative producers,
- Triple play and beyond,
- The digitally enriched reality,
- Towards user-centric computing,
- Spread of the service-oriented-paradigm,
- More news with less value,
- Spotlighting information islands, and
- From rigid media to intertainment services.
The report has been produced through cooperation between Ifra and Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI – German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence) in Saarbrücken, Germany.
Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH (DFKI – German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence), is one of the largest nonprofit contract research institutes in the field of innovative software technology based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods. Ifra is the one of the leading organisations newspaper/media organisaiotns in the world and operates from 10 locations woldwide.
