Broadcasting moves to digital,
computers, internet, mobile phone
By Jon Fernquest |
Watch TV on your computer over the internet or on your mobile phone while you travel home by bus or wait in line at Carrefour. Broadcasting in Thailand is moving towards digital platforms:
Scott Russell, Thailand country leader for IBM global business services, said that from 2006-10, four factors were pushing broadcasting toward digital platforms: a variety of electronic devices - from personal computers to mobile phones, content innovation, the behaviour of buyers, advertisers and consumers, and the popularity of digital devices.
Advertising money is creeping slowing but surely into the internet making it profitable:
Citing a Forrester Research study in 2006, Mr Russell said 78% of media buyers believed television was less effective than it was two years ago. When asked to spend an additional US$1 million of their marketing budgets, they said they would spend half of it on internet search services and only 19% on television.
Supakit Tiyawatchlapong, country manager for engineering solutions at IBM Thailand, noted significant changes over the last year:
Mr Supakit said IBM was already providing services to some clients such as Channel 7 TV and RS Plc, the country's second-largest entertainment firm, which have switched to digital equipment.He said he had seen rapid change over the last 12 months in the Thai broadcasting industry. For example, MCOT Plc, the operator of Channel 9, joined with the Sanook.com portal to share revenue from advertisements on MCOT's website. At the same time, Channel 7 introduced an interactive website to bring new experience to its audiences.
There are four business models for broadcasting:
a. Traditional media such as TV
b. Communities that integrate users and community content within a "walled" access environment such as Apple's iPod and iPhone
c. Content "hyper-syndication" in which professional content is available online and on standard devices, such as My BBC Player, abc.com and Amazon.com.
d. New platform aggregation including social-networking communities Second Life, YouTube, and Myspace.
Checkout Post TV online, the Bangkok Post's new Thai language TV channel.
See Wikipedia on Internet TV and on one popular tv aggregator named Miro. For the educational see University of California TV (Source: Bangkok Post, 27-11-07, temp-link)
Vocabulary:
broadcasting - sending any media (radio, tv, internet video or audio) from one source to many recipients in real-time (without a delay)
a platform - technology used as a foundation for real-world applications
digital platforms - a computing platform, like a PDA or mobile phone, with hardware and an operating system
content - media that is consumed (a news story that is read, a tv show that is watched, a song on the radio listened to)
innovation - a new way of doing something, an improvement
creeping - moving so slowly and quietly that no one realises it is happening
slowing but surely - it's going slowly but will surely happen in the future
Forrester Research - an independent technology and market research company that provides its clients with advice about technology's impact on business and consumers (See Wikipedia)
a portal - a website that is an entrance to other sites on the internet, typically has forums, a search engine, content, etc
walled access environment - buy content like songs from an online store like iTunes and play it on the iPod ("walled" you can't go outside of iTunes and iPod, you must use them)
hyper-syndication - everything is syndicated
My BBC Player - now known as the "iplayer" (See Wikipedia)
aggregation - collecting together and making an index to content on the internet
social-networking - sofware that links people together to make a community like MySpace or Facebook (See Wikipedia on Social Network Service)
