THE TOOLS REVOLUTION

to enhance the storytelling process. Digital media enables consumers to interact with stories and information, and digital media can be distributed to a wide range of devices via multiple networks, while maintaining consistent quality and branding. When the “desktop video” revolution began, many believed that this was nothing more than the digitization of analog video storytelling. What really happened, however, was the transformation from manipulating physical media (film, tape, etc.) to the manipulation of digital media—bits. This transformation has eliminated many of the barriers that once existed between various content-creation markets. A consistent set of tools can be used to manipulate assets, which can be expressed in multiple physical media, like print, outdoor and point-of-purchase display, product packaging, video, audio, and direct consumption via a digital media appliance such as a PC or PDA. The manipulation and re-expression of common digital assets supports the delivery of a consistent message and branding to anyone, anywhere, anytime. The key elements of the convergence of media and content-creation tools from multiple media include:
• The use of media objects stored as digital media files
• The use of software-based tools that employ consistent user interface design
• The ability to cross-reference (hyperlink) content delivered across multiple media; this in turn supports the ability to access depth information and/or similar content
• The ability to localize and customize content through the intelligent assembly of media objects into digital media compositions Many of these elements are coming together via the World Wide Web. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is a relatively simple way to create object-based compositions; although it is based on the assumption that text is the most basic object type in the composition, the principles are equally applicable to advanced forms of digital media content that rely on audio and video to carry the story. HTML adds tags that define relationships among various objects in the Webpage composition, as well as links to other pages (or points within a page). Objects can include text, graphics, still images, audio, video, and animations.
These objects are delivered to a browser, which composes them based on the HTML tags. As the Web has evolved, more advanced techniques have been developed to control the composition and to customize the presentation based on user preferences. These preferences may be specified in browser settings, or they may be based on past interactions with the server—in essence the server recognizes the user and customizes the content based on a profile it has created from past behaviors.
Web browsers also rely on local cache to minimize the need to request frequently used objects and large objects (large files) that require a significant amount of time to download. If an object is not cached locally, the browser requests it from the server(s) that are contributing objects to the composition. It is important to note that objects may come from multiple servers. For example, it is becoming commonplace to mirror large video files in servers all around the world—servers that are close to the edge of the network. When you request one of these objects—for example, a streaming video file—the request is routed to the closest mirror server. In most cases this bypasses network congestion and distributes the load across multiple servers. It is only a small leap to the mirroring of content locally. For example, if you subscribe to a Webbased service like The Wall Street Journal Online Edition, the content could be broadcast when it’s updated and mirrored in the cache of hundreds of thousands of subscribers. When a component of a page is updated, only the changes would need to be broadcast to all of the subscribers. The broadcast medium could be the Internet, DBS, cable, or terrestrial data broadcasts.
Going a step further, it is quite feasible to localize and personalize all kinds of content in using local composition techniques and objects played from cache. For example, the name and address of a local merchant in your neighborhood could be overlayed on a television commercial.