Medialoper’s 9 Reasons why Digital Media products are a bad deal for consumers is also unwittingly pointing out exactly why digital media products are hard for ‘old’ media organisations to produce.
They are very much more complicated, therefore time-consuming and expensive than simply manipulating text.
Platform lock-in is a huge issue for content creators. Companies spend hundreds of thousands of content management systems which can very often trap you into producing a certain type of content, in a certain way. Of course, these systems are expandable, but often only by the company who made it, which commits you into spending even more money with them!
Take publishing as example where once a ‘product’ has been created, its lifespan is often dependent on the equipment used to produce it. Once a newspaper has bought printing plant with particular features, you can publish for ten years or more until the gear needs replacing. Newspapers have grown used to long product lifecycles.
Online, the life of a product is much shorter, possibly only a year or so, and this means being able to continually innovate.
