real madrid and content

Vinay Kamat

Is Real Madrid a content company? The answer to that question provides a glimpse of the economy that we live in, where content drives digital strategy. Not surprisingly, Microsoft, Apple, Intel, Google, Yahoo and a host of other digital players are moving towards a single destination: the living room.

What they seek to do is simple: create mother platforms that manage content flows from all electronic devices and delivery channels. Such a platform will be the nucleus of the digital home’s content ecosystem, which includes TVs, PCs, gaming consoles, sound boxes, PDAs, digital cameras, and other electronic devices.

The big challenge is not technology, nor technology platforms, but content architecture. Already, technology has moved beyond our expectation. Take Microsoft’s Xbox, for instance. Its high-powered CPU, HD gaming display, and superior graphics make the console a pocket-rocket. Look at content delivery channels which are becoming smarter, quicker, and smoother. Yes, broadband is becoming broader and faster.

With technology setting a scorching pace, companies are now focusing on content architecture. Here’s Kodak CEO Antonio Perez’s take on the future, which he mapped at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week: “Consumers own the future of digital imaging—their pictures, their memories, their life’s data, the stories they can tell about their life. But it’s no longer about just pictures or voice, data or text. It’s the future where information and imaging become one, and consumers can access the important images of their life anytime, anywhere.”

What Perez is talking about is content architecture. It’s an area that is still evolving because nobody is sure how content will be consumed or who will be tomorrow’s content king? Will it be PlayStation, iPod, Google or Windows?

iPod may have been a breakthrough but it’s really iTunes—the business model that made music downloads possible—that is Apple’s biggest idea. It made a music revolution possible by pulling music labels into the digital era. It built a novel content architecture: music on tap.

In the Entertainment Economy, author Michael Wolf describes a similar transformation: “As retail stores began to reproduce the look and feel of theme parks, it became clear to me that the line between entertainment and the rest of the economy had disappeared.”

In the new internet era, the line between technology and content is disappearing too, with technology companies seeking bits, instead of chips, to rethink their strategy.

So, if Google can be labeled a content company, why can’t Real Madrid or BCCI (Board of Cricket Control for India)? As the football club’s corporate managing director, Carlos Martinez de Albornoz, describes it, in Financial Times: “We structured ourselves as a company and began to think of ourselves as content providers. This was an authentic revolution.”

The content kickoff in today’s web championship is an authentic revolution too. It will decide whether tomorrow’s economy will be an entertainment economy, an experience economy, a search economy, or an economy of pods.