One of the things that we are able to do with digital media that is a challenge to do with tape media is off-shoring. For example, you have workstations in Los Angeles that are connected to tape machines that can digitize that content into digital files. Using digital supply chain technology you can offshore some of the work; it helps lower the cost for the owners of the tape library and gets it into digital files much quicker so that you can move that content into other distribution, whether it’s television programming or VOD. It opens up a whole new set of possibilities that they’ve had in publishing now for probably fifteen years.
Things are really only getting started. The truth of the matter is the big labor intensive aspect of Video on Demand and digital files is the metadata. Everything from the title of the content to a description of what actor might be in a movie or what athlete might be in a piece of video that’s playing back at this moment, all of that is metadata. Those files are very effective if that metadata is very rich and very descriptive so that the content creators can easily get to that, can easily find that content and re-purpose it. However, that is a very labor-intensive thing. There is an automation that can describe everything that’s happening in the scene of a movie or in a highlight of a sporting event, and that is where off-shoring is going to be a really powerful tool for people all over the world. It is something I’ve got my eye on, and I think it’s going to be a big business in the future.
