We are living through nothing less than the total revolution of the way in which human beings communicate. This revolution is more profound than the invention of the printing press, more profound even than the advent of desktop publishing, because in each of those cases the basic process remained essentially unchanged. The task of creating books was certainly streamlined by the introduction of the press, and books became somewhat less expensive, but the customers of books remained the elite. Similarly, desktop publishing rearranged who was creating printed matter but books and magazines were still distributed primarily by the same large companies. These were important developments but nowhere near as revolutionary as what we face today.

The next decade or so will see absolutely everything change in regards to the way that media-in particular, dynamic media-is acquired, edited, managed, and distributed. Motion picture production, broadcast television, commercials, games, corporate videos, trade events-all of these are transforming from how we understand them today into something we may not yet be able to envision. A whole host of new technologies including voice activation, handwriting recognition, wireless cameras, and display tools will revamp every single aspect of the media production, post-production, and distribution landscape. We already live in a world where a person can enjoy a feature length film via a personal, handheld DVD player. Tomorrow we'll be able to access the Internet in our cars via voice activation and transact audio-only business without once taking our hands off the steering wheel or our eyes off the road.

“At some point the IP network is going to be the primary source of a company’s in-house communications signal.” Randal Lemke

As audio and video production professionals in all facets of the greater communications business, our challenge today is to make the most of this intense transition era. The awesome impact all of this is going to have on the ways in which we live and work and play are only now beginning to be calculated. And the numbers are staggering.

In a recent special report, Newsweek touched on many of these issues. Consider the following: Today, the report said, nearly 90 million U.S. employees are online, more than double those who are not. Last year what Newsweek termed "North American Information-Technology Spending" reached the $998 billion mark; and it will exceed $1,200 billion by 2003. "The Labor Department projects employment for commercial artists to rise 25 percent by 2008, spurred in part by an increased demand for digital talent," Newsweek reported. According to that same report, analysts predict that 84 percent of the new cars sold in 2005 will be equipped with telematics, a new term the automotive industry has coined for e-capabilities such as linkage to the Internet.

The report said that 80 percent of corporations in the world increased their spending for e-commerce infrastructure. That number makes this final Newsweek statistic hardly a surprise: By 2008, computer-support jobs will increase by 222 percent.

What all these numbers really add up to is that the demand for professionally produced audio and visual media has never been greater and is poised to increase exponentially. Is the written word threatened? Probably not, because a well-conceived script forms the backbone of every successful visual effort whether it's a feature film or a complex training video, and that is not going to change. What is changing is how media gets produced, and where, and by whom. The decreasing cost of digital tools has expanded the number of people who are media literate and raised the awareness of what makes for a quality production.

The Digital Infrastructure
Two things seem certain: all business-to-business communications in the future will be digital and virtually all of it will be connected to your company's network. Make no mistake-that will be the near future. This is of critical importance to producers and highlights the increasing role that technical people have in the creative process.

Consider the basic sales and marketing presentation. Your key client has asked you to produce an effects-laden program to help close a multimillion-dollar deal. During the presentation there's a minor glitch in the software and the program freezes, temporarily. The customer's IT man investigates, fixes the problem, and the meeting continues. Now imagine that same scenario a few years from today, when that projector is connected to the customer's IP network. That same glitch has the potential to close down that company's entire operation. The point here is that the digital future offers tremendous possibilities but with those possibilities comes a higher degree of risk. Getting the most out of those possibilities and minimizing the risks as we move forward means that the creative community and the technical people they work with-systems integrators, IT managers, and engineers-are going to have to learn to communicate better.

Three key determinations must be made to everyone's satisfaction: deciding the best ways to create this new digital infrastructure; concluding how it should work; and selecting just who will be in charge of the information it contains.

The potential answers to these and other questions will be discussed at INFOCOMM 2001, the annual trade event of the International Communications Industries Association (ICIA), in Las Vegas this June.

The concept of projectors that link directly to an IP network will be one highlight of this show. At least one manufacturer will add the idea of a wireless networkable projector to the mix. A related theme will be the increased demand for and use of streaming media in corporate communications. Projectors will break the two-pound barrier. The price of plasma screens may improve. And the conference will provide a status report on the state of both the business and technology of digital cinema.

Overriding all of this is the current state of the economy. Randal Lemke, executive director of the ICIA, is enthusiastic about both the upcoming convention and the industries it serves. And he doesn't think the economy is necessarily as bad as has been written in recent months. Even if it is worse than he guesses, Lemke says, he hasn't seen any impact on the core businesses of ICIA members; namely, the sale and installation of AV equipment in offices, homes, theaters, restaurants, airports, etcetera. The reasoning, he believes, is that "It's difficult to build a new installation without these audiovisual appliances."

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