Michel DELRAN - Personal Website

Creativity, Innovation and Technologies, Processes and Methods, Digital and Performing Arts

ICT, Media & Marketing

ITIL, Digital Asset Management, Richmedia and Radio?

Today, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are almost underpinning all areas of your life. It may be apparent or not but does it need to be frustrating or boring?  How do you react when some clerk  just tells you: "It's not me, it's the computer!" ?

How can ICT deserve the passion and creativity that the media creators put in? Well, advertisements and media are all around us and we receive thousands of messages every where we turn.

It could seem overwhelming but think about it, it doesn't have to be intrusive and disruptive all the time.

The Interruption Age

The Information age has transformed into the Interruption Age and it becomes extremely challenging to concentrate and focus when solicitations seem to burst everywhere around you. We should be able to control and manage it correctly.

With the arising of Social Networking, the constant expansion of Mobile communication and other Skype, MSN, SMS, you name it. it's difficult to hide and be left alone. Do you always succeed to find what you where looking for on the web with all the distractions that just flourish on most of the pages you come across.
All the new equipment and gadgets you own now have all a switch off button, so you can claim back your freedom at any time. This could be a bit extreme, these gadgets can benefit you and make you more effective and productive when you are in control. The difficulty is that you can't switch your senses and your conscience and marketers have fully understand that.

Interactive content for broadcasting and the web

For that, there are some methodology to implement, infrastructure to design and many objects to organize. All of this relies mainly on computers and ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) has been designed to help enterprises to take the best of them. ITIL takes in account the Business Objectives of the Entreprise and align them with the Information Technology reality. This applies to any organizations. When it comes to the dream part, we immediately think of video, audio, images, 3D, and so on. These are also bytes and files that are lurking somewhere on computers. Digital Media Asset Management defines again a methodology to track them and make the best use of these objects at all levels in the Media Industry. Then, all these objects can be combined to create interactive interfaces where the user is free to select what he wants to see and when. This is the purpose of richmedia: Enriched multimedia. And finally, what medium is best fitted to distribute these interactive contents? TV proposes not enough interactivity features and is mainly designed for video. Radio if we consider the new progress of the digital radio market, is bound to propose a significant level of interactivity when it is combined to mobile phones. And guess what? You may receive hours and hours of richmedia content for free on your digital radio and pay only when you do an action on your set... Wanna know more? Then check the pages of this site.

The MixWeb project

I designed a new project called MIXWEB for which I have publish a patent. This project defines an innovative way to produce real time multimedia contents including audio, video, texts, interactivity relying on a distributed and secure architecture. As the project was too early to work properly at this time due to the Internet limitations, I decided to focus on the immediate part of the project which is the user interface. This led to implement richmedia programming detailed in a another page of this site. Richmedia implies to deal with many different multimedia objects such as video clips, audio elements, graphics, photos, texts, interactive objects, etc. All these objects may be used and reused as needed and some of them may have rights to take care of, legal aspects, financial aspects as well as technical aspects. This is in fact very similar to Asset Management (Configuration Management as described in ITIL). The link between ITIL and DAM/MAM was then obvious. Joining the AES (Audio Engineer Society), I discovered that the Media Industry was not yet ready to implement MAM as it should be done. My own project is only thinkable if real and effective Digital Asset Management is implemented from the start. Otherwise, it can rapidly evolve in huge mess of multimedia objects. I then conducted a thorough study of the DAM/MAM market to discover that the actual Software offering is still rather poor in terms of features and functionalities especially for richmedia producing. Most of the tools available today on the market provides partial Media Asset Management for production teams and mainly for video. Although, a set of tools may be used to fullfil more or less the needs, the processes are mostly manual and lacks true integration. So I designed a new concept for MAM applied to the multimedia/richmedia entreprise management which relies on the experience gained by practicing ITIL on "traditional" IT infrastructures.

Truly Interactive & Enriched Multimedia

The term richmedia is used for many things today and most of the contents existing today are based on Macromedia Flash or Shockwave, Microsoft Windows Media, SMIL (Real Networks), Apple QuickTime and Java. My own definition is Enrichment of a specific media. That leans that if you consider one media (audio for example), this media should remain the main component of the content. Then it can be enhanced with text for example (like captioning or karaoke). In a second step, you may add photographs or graphics (like adding PowerPoint slides on a conference speech). In another step, you may add video on the whole content or only on a part of it. In another step, you may wish to add Internet links to a web site (the site of the speaker company). You may wish to e-commerce links to incite listeners to buy a product that the speaker is talking about. You may wish to add logos, speaker's CV, etc. In the end, your original audio content will be enhanced with many different objects, each one for a specific purpose, but guess what, the main component is still audio. In fact, you can suppress all the surrounding stuff without breaking or denaturing the audio. Fantastic, I just describe what Digital Radio is! Audio, with other objects designed to support audio! But audio nonetheless!! Then, why spend so much designing additional stuff that are necessary? The answer to this question is described in the pages of this site. Have a look at Radio InvenT and LE Radio to discover the added value that can be achieved using richmedia rather than pure audio. One of the main purpose of richmedia today is to ally e-commerce and media. This applies to radio, TV and mobile phones of course. For this, there are different marketing approaches. It's rather obvious on mobile phones where users will receive richmedia contents for which they have paid for because it's a one-to-one model. Things become more challenging with radio and TV as it is a broadcast technology and most of the time the user will not pay to get content. The richmedia concepts and contents are labelled with the mark V8 Sounds & Bytes on my site. The MIXWEB project includes this particular marketing and e-commerce approach especially designed to be used on Digital Radio, Internet (wired and wireless) and mobile phones.

Digital Radio - An interactive enhanced radio concept

The Digital Radio Broadcasting is still in its test phase in France. It's very develop in the UK, somewhat in Germany, Nordic countries, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, Singapour, Korea, Australia. The DAB technology was designed in 1995 in France by TDF and CCETT but due to economical and political reasons mainly, the implementation process was aborted in France. The WorldDAB Forum is the worldwide organization in charge of DAB promotion and development. Technology wise, the DAB is the most effective way to broadcast multimedia contents on mobile sets, but it used old technology and some broadcasters think it is not that adapted to today needs. An emerging alternative is the Korean T-DMB which is used to broadcast TV channels on radio sets. Another interesting technology derives from the Digital Television, called DVB-H, which is also used by phone manufacturers such as Sony and Nokia. In 2003, I joined the organization for Digital Radio promotion called "Vivement La Radio Numérique" with VDL (Voix de Lyon - French broadcaster). I organized during 3 years a set of conferences for the tradeshow LE RADIO on the subject of Digital Radio in France. The French regulation bureau (CSA) took the engagement in February 2005 to launch officially an enquiry and bids for Digital Radio before the end of 2005. So, if there are no more political lobbying, digital radio should be available in France in 2006. The radio concepts shown on the Radio InvenT and LE Radio sites are truly technologically ahead of what the actual radios and broadcasters intend to do. These concepts are closer to the Visual Radio concept developed by Virgin Radio in the UK. Société Radio Numérique in Canada is also close to this concept.

Expertise and Journalism

Thanks to Editions HF, Radio Actu who give me the chances to build and share my expertise on the subjects of Digital Asset Management and Digital Radio. I report on events related to this subject and especially at the IBC in Amsterdam. Articles are published on Radio Actu site. I use these opportunities to increase my expertise and market studies in my main focus. Everything in touch with Media Infrastructure, Technology and Methodology, Digital Radio, Digital TV and related markets.

Downloadable CVs

For obvious confidentiality reasons, I will ask you to register your interest in the form below to request a CV, I will send you promptly by email the CV in pdf format.

Thank you for using the form below. There are 3 CVs available. Could you use the Comments box to indicate which one you would like:

  • IT Service Management Architect
  • IT Service Asset and Configuration Management Specialist
  • Digital Media Expert
  • You can also use LinkedIn to obtain more professionally related information.

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