Broadcasters, multimedia players must embrace R&D model to succeed: report

Players in the multimedia and interactive development field need to embrace a research and development model or risk becoming nothing more than valets to media titans elsewhere, says the author of a new report on Canada's broadband content."Canadian producers with advanced thoughts for developing interactive content are handcuffed," says Sam Punnett, VP of innovation at Delvinia Inc, the company that prepared Filling the Pipe: Stimulating Canada's Broadband Content Industry Through R & D. "There's a struggle. The broadcast industry has had it cozy for 40 years. They have established ways of doing things and are used to being protected by the regulator. They aren't as proactive as they could be."As a result of the traditional mindset of TV broadcasters, the new digital television channels set to launch this September may be slow to embrace the interactive elements contained in the licence applications they filed with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, he says. He concedes that some of the reluctance to move ahead is tied to squabbling over who would actually own the rights to the interactive material. Nobody wants to push ahead and invest in the development of interactive elements if there are no assurances that they can recoup their costs and possibly even make money. The fact that there are no established business models is also making it difficult, he notes.Filling the Pipe emerged from five roundtables held in February and March in Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver. Content producers, traditional and emerging interactive broadcasters, technology companies, game developers and academics/researchers were among those participating. Punnett calls his report separate but complementary to the National Broadband Task Force report, released June 18.That report, entitled The New National Dream: Networking the Nation for Broadband Access, calls for government to invest $1.5 billion of a price tag that could top $4.5 billion to extend high-speed Internet to rural and remote communities by 2004. The 35-member national task force also identified the importance of developing broadband content to drive traffic to the new infrastructure once it's in place.Task force chair David Johnston suggested that for every dollar spent on infrastructure, another go toward content and application development. The group singled out the need for content and services in the areas of learning, health, government, culture, entertainment, community building and e-business. For the most part, the report focuses on infrastructure, while the Delvinia study, prepared for CANARIE Inc, Canadian Heritage and Industry Canada, addresses the problem of a dearth of Canadian broadband content.Infrastructure vs. contentLike Johnston's task force report, Filling the Pipe makes note of tension between support to infrastructure and content. Punnett's report reads: "An ongoing debate between technologists and creative entrepreneurs questions whether the driving force behind the growth of broadband in Canada is, or ought to be, infrastructure or content."Will demand for content push infrastructure development, or does Canada need enhanced infrastructure to exist before it can justify increased content development?" The roundtable participants indicated that the cost of bandwidth tended to be more of an issue than access to it. They also suggested that a "multitude of technological standards also stymies development of all kinds of content."As well, Punnett ties the drought of original IP work to a lack of "compelling incentives to go there." For example, his report states, "Moreover, many large, more lucrative companies have stopped generating commercial interactive content altogether, having seen no return on their attempts to date." It also notes that some companies are using fee-for-service models to sustain the establishment of content but that that approach "does not serve the long-term objectives of building an industry that can successfully export its own interactive intellectual properties."The roundtable participants indicated the way to stimulate innovative Canadian broadband content as well as to seed speculative advanced content projects was to establish "some organized means of risk funding, partnership building, and knowledge sharing." Filling the Pipe notes that advanced broadband content development must be thought of as part of a larger economic agenda that can only be supported through a change in perspective on R&D.According to the report, content development as R&D consists of three projects areas: the innovation of new technology and advanced content products, the development and leveraging of existing technology and advanced content products, and the conduct of baseline research into interactivity in general.The innovation of new technology would include such things as building prototypes of new kinds of content, some of which might exist on different platforms, and gaining a better understanding of the user experience. Examples of the development of content, noted in the report, include experimenting with ways of using interactive content to drive traditional media traffic and vice versa, experimenting with business models, and identifying new markets. Baseline research encompasses pure research that is not product-driven, such as cognitive user experiences, user demographics and interactive concept development.Punnett sees government playing a role in fostering an environment that is more R&D based and not averse to risk taking. Ultimately, he says, private capital will be the catalyst in sparking content development. However, he points out that the government can help by introducing incentives, such as tax credits, which can decrease the capital risk to investors."The government introduced tax credits for film and television and that jump started a lot of production in that industry," Punnett notes. Howeveer, he is not an advocate though of Canadian content quotas, to which both the television and radio industries are subjected."We can't have content quotas with broadband. It won't work because creating a walled garden would be destructive to the open model of the Internet," says Punnett.He hopes the next step will be for some of the suggestions identified in the report to be put into practice. The report may provide the impetus for establishing a new research coalition of online content. Susan Baldwin, senior director of operations at CANARIE, told CNM a few months ago that she was pushing for a research coalition that would experiment with new interfaces and forms of advanced content. (CNM, March 8/01).

Broadcasters, multimedia players must embrace R&D model to succeed: report

News | 06/28/2001 4:00 am EDT

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