ABSTRACT

This chapter introduces the platform concept and illustrates the basic idea of product platforms in the media industry. It provides insight into possible system support for media product platforms. The chapter further analyzes the economic rationale behind product platforms from a cost and revenue perspective. Platform concepts focus on the similarities of products and processes, and do no longer consider products and technologies of a company as independent from each other. Major technological drivers for product platforms are new technologies for content storage and content representation, such as the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and multimedia databases. Product platforms allow for the creation of media products through the bundling of existing content modules. To create, store, and manage these bundles, the product platform has to handle specific information which is represented by construction plans. The media industry is made up of several sectors with different companies using different media and running different business models.