Sun Media Advisory Board Unveils Findings Around Top Challenges
Facing Digital Media Industry
Advisory Board Established to Identify and Solve Digital Distribution
Pain-Points
LAS VEGAS (Business Wire EON) April 14, 2008 --
Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq:JAVA) announced the formation of the Sun
Media Advisory Board (Sun MAB) today at the 2008 NAB Show. Sun MAB is an
executive advisory board guided by Sun and leading media industry
executives that is focused on identifying and solving key challenges
found in today's digital media distribution industry.
The Sun MAB has initially focused on identifying and solving key
challenges brought about by a major market shift from isolated,
proprietary systems to an integrated “file-based”
workflow across the media value chain. As part of its initial findings,
the Sun MAB has cited media transformation, content identification and
video storage optimization to be the key business challenges facing the
industry today. Through the collaboration of its member companies, the
Sun MAB is currently engaging in several projects aimed at meeting these
challenges and aiding companies in successfully adapting to the changing
digital media landscape.
The Sun MAB agenda is developed by a steering committee comprised of
senior executives from MLB Advanced Media, Turner Entertainment
Networks, and HBO Communications. The board offers participants a
non-commercial forum to share and solve issues of common concern in
building business models, technology, ecosystems and standards to enable
profitable digital media distribution practices. Currently, the board is
collaborating to optimize video solutions to meet requirements of major
cable and TV programmers, film studios, broadcast networks and content
packagers, based on Sun and innovative third-party applications.
“Our customers came to us with a desire for an
executive forum in which to validate shared business challenges with
their peers, and work together to identify practical solutions,”
said Darrell Jordan-Smith, vice president for Sun Microsystems' global
communications and media practice. “The Sun
MAB is unique in that it works off of a customer-driven agenda, ensuring
that its projects and solutions map directly to real and current
business challenges. Based on our findings to date, we are already
making strides to better equip our customers with the technology they
need to compete effectively in the digital age.”
“HBO Communications is continually challenged
to keep pace with the company's new business initiatives. We've embraced
file-based solutions and need to constantly improve throughput while
maintaining HBO quality standards,” said
Charles Cataldo, senior vice president of broadcast and studio
operations for HBO Communications. “Sun's
commitment to sponsorship of the Sun MAB around our prioritized
interests and concerns results in a unified 'voice of the customer'.
This has made us more effective in engaging Sun and partners to deliver
optimized solutions that remove complexity and cost.”
The Sun MAB findings announced today and its current projects include:
Media Transformation
A proliferation of devices, media players and other content receivers
has created nearly limitless opportunities for consumers to access
digital content. For content owners and providers to remain competitive,
they must master the process of content transformation across a variety
of formats and platforms. The Sun MAB media transformation project is
focused on optimizing content transcoding in multi-operating system (OS)
environments, with a goal of automating and accelerating the
ingest-encode-transcode process. The ultimate outcome is to enable easy,
ubiquitous consumer access to high quality content and programming
across Web, phone, set-top and online retail channels.
“Format proliferation is costing media
organizations significantly in terms of storage, infrastructure and
increasing complexity,” said Joe Inzerillo,
senior vice president, Multimedia & Distribution for MLB Advanced Media. “Transcoding
is universally a core issue for digital content providers, specifically
at MLBAM where we’re approaching 20-30
formats per original asset with further growth a near certainty. Sun's
support of Sun MAB is essential in accelerating industry consensus
around technologies and practices to remove critical bottlenecks in the
transcoding process.”
Video Storage Optimization
Today's market conditions mandate that content providers offer vast
libraries of easy-to-navigate, personalized programming and advertising,
without passing increased operating costs and complexities onto
consumers. In particular, the move to high definition (HD) while
supporting standard definition (SD) programming, online retail, mobile
and broadband distribution has strongly increased financial and
operational pressures on content providers. The Sun MAB sees improved
video storage accessibility, performance, and utilization as a key
opportunity to compress steps and remove cost from the process. The
video storage optimization project is currently focused on streamlining
digital work-flows to improve digital video storage capabilities.
“The pace of change in the industry makes it
imperative that the media industry and their technology partners work
together to address acute issues in digital product distribution,
reducing time to market for new products, and reducing cost of
implementation,” said Clyde D. Smith, senior
vice president, Global Broadcast Technology and Standards for Turner
Broadcasting Systems. “Turner, like the rest
of the media industry, is addressing the key issues of how to best
incorporate IT technologies with our state-of-the-art HD video
workflows. Sun's support of the Sun MAB gives us direct access to SME's,
and an ongoing forum to develop and share use cases and address common
media industry concerns. Additionally, we greatly value the opportunity
to network with industry peers in a non-competitive forum.”
Content Identification
To avoid passing digital content costs onto the consumer, content
providers are focused on offering highly relevant, personalized
advertising that does not deteriorate the customer experience. With
enhanced content identification, fingerprinting and watermarking
capabilities, content providers can improve their abilities to deter
piracy, track content usage and monetize assets. Consumer engagement can
be further enhanced in the future through transformational uses of
content, such as mash-ups and streamlined peer-to-peer content sharing.
The Sun MAB content identification project will explore new revenue
opportunities and reduced participation costs for content owners, based
on content identification technologies.
Sun MAB hosts periodic roundtables and workshops throughout the year, by
invitation only to executives in the content provider and content
aggregator industry. For more information on Sun MAB, contact katherine.parker@sun.com.
About Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Sun Microsystems develops the technologies that power the global
marketplace. Guided by a singular vision -- "The Network is the
Computer" (TM) -- Sun drives network participation through shared
innovation, community development and open source leadership. Sun can be
found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com
Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo and the Network is the Computer are
trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the
United States and other countries.
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