Consumers Lives Unfold Online

Consumers Lives Unfold Online

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Through the use of images, video and text consumers continue to use the Internet in myriad ways as their own personal sounding board. The digital content creation (DCC) market has seen a healthy period of growth in the last couple of years as the total DCC market grew 16% from $2.6 billion to reach more than $3 billion in 2006, according to recently released Jon Peddie Research report titled 2007 Digital Content Creation Report. The report claims the fastest growing segments in the future will be interactive development and video as, “the web offers new distribution networks and new programming approaches such as AJAX to enable small compelling applications to be developed that extend the power of individual web sites.”

“We are seeing big shifts in the digital content creation market. For example there have been game changing acquisitions by Adobe with the acquisition of Macromedia and Serious Magic, Autodesk’s acquisition of Alias and Colorfront and Google’s acquisition of Sketchup and YouTube. The landscape is changing right in front of us all. It’s all good, but companies are going to have to be nimble to adapt,” says Kathleen Maher, Senior Analyst at Jon Peddie Research and author of the DCC Report.

According to the JPR report, for the short term the outlook looks good for all segments in digital content creation. There are exciting prospects for consumer products and for a growing mainstream of professional products. There are some challenges ahead, most notably for the graphics and imaging market. The growth of digital cameras and the growing understanding among consumers of the potential of digital photos and video has contributed to overall growth but in the case of digital photography, free tools are becoming available for the limited amount of editing consumers generally perform (adjust, crop, post/email). Video is a more complicated process and thus is not easily boiled down to a few processes. In addition, new avenues of distribution such as media players, YouTube, MySpace, etc. are helping spur interest in consumer video editing. In the future however, instant video editing tools have the potential to confuse the market for traditional vendors.

The professional market overall is being defined by a move away from proprietary systems toward mainstream, desktop based systems. Most companies selling professional DCC tools are trying to adjust to this trend because there is an obvious positive side: As tools become more accessible in price and ease of use, there are more people who can take advantage of them.

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