In the movie, Moneyball, baseball was changed. Billy Beane saw the game not as a game, but as a business. He wasn’t interested in building a team around the abilities of the players alone. He understood that winning or losing a series was based on how those players were managed.
The media business is now changing in the same way. Success or failure no longer rests solely on content creation. It is determined by how that content is managed. So, like the Oakland Athletics Billy Beane managed, we are looking at a future in which the game we play is no longer Content is King, but something called Mediaball.
We even have our own version of the sophisticated management analytics Billy brought to the table. It’s called Enterprise Media Management, powered by an underlying technology we’re all getting to know and love—Media Asset Management.
Under Billy’s regime, the objective of the game shifted from hitting home runs to achieving the highest possible on-base percentage. In the media business, that translates to how many times you can use a given asset and how much revenue can be derived from that usage.
Creating a great piece of content and using it once is like hitting a single ball over the wall. Using a piece of content four times across multiple distribution platforms is like getting four guys on base. Both ways, one run scores. But in the latter, having three guys still on leaves you with an opportunity to widen that score by 300%. And that’s the kind of number that ends up winning games, no matter what business they are played in.
While the Oakland Athletics never won the Series they were after, the Boston Red Sox did take the concept and ride it all the way to two Series titles. Media enterprises are doing the same. They are all starting to play some form of Mediaball because, truth be told, they have no choice. No choice, that is, if they want to stay competitive. The only option any real player has at this point is what kind of equipment they play their Mediaball with.
Having been in the media business a long time, Avid saw this coming from the start and made the shift early. Now, we’re way ahead of the game with an aggregation of the most integrated, intelligent Enterprise Media Management solutions on the market. Interplay Production and Media Asset Management. Advanced shared ISIS storage. Premier creative tools like Media Composer 6 and Pro Tools 10 that hook completely into the Enterprise Media Management environment. We’ve even got the coaching staff in the form of our Professional Services Group that can help you determine the best way to set up your team.
So, let us take you out to the Mediaball game. It’s what everyone is playing now and there’s no better time to learn how to play.