BEYOND THE WEB

Objectives

This report aims to describe the ways in which the networked environment is expected to develop over the next few years, and to examine the implications that these developments may have for content providers.

The initiatives discussed as part of this report - peer to peer (P2P) collaboration, web services, and the Semantic Web - are in the early stages of development, but are either supported by major technology players such as Microsoft and IBM, being worked on by key standards bodies such as Dublin Core, or have demonstrated the ability to fulfil a clear market need. Consequently we believe that all of the developments discussed here will not only come to fruition over the next few years (although not necessarily in the exact ways which are currently being envisaged), but will have the ability to significantly alter and improve the way in which both business and consumer users receive information and services.

Timescales

The three core activities discussed in this report are at various stages of development. P2P services such as Napster are already in use on the web, and have proved their ability to deliver a strongly desired service to the end user (particularly in the consumer market, to date). Web services should also be able to deliver features which are keenly desired, but in this case perhaps more by businesses than consumers. Some web services applications are currently underway, but we have not yet seen the large scale usage that P2P has experienced. This is mainly due to the need to develop and agree upon standards before web services can be rolled out effectively. The Semantic Web is the activity furthest away from full-scale implementation, although there have been cases in which the principles laid down by the Semantic Web have been used to provide online services (these are very much still in a beta stage of development).

While full scale roll out of these services may be a few years away, it is important that content providers not only keep abreast of what is going on, but investigate how these services could be used, perhaps within the next year or so, to deliver value to customers or to improve back end systems and processes. Early technologies in both P2P and web services have now been tested to a certain extent, and the problems of using ?buggy? first version systems should no longer be evident.

Implications for content providers : P2P

Copyright

File-sharing networks allow a user to purchase content and then share it with millions of others, rather than just a handful of friends.

DRM

Digital Rights Management will be vital to the digital delivery of all types of content, not only to collect revenues but also to preserve content in its entire and original form. The viral nature of P2P plays directly to the superdistribution model offered by DRM solutions.

New skills

Content providers must find new ways to generate revenues from the sharing of their content, before other players do so illegally.

Marketing

Search terms passed on to the community could result in a re-direct to an appropriate page on a content provider?s web site.

Cost

By allowing end-users to distribute content between themselves, content providers can save up to 90% on content delivery costs (Source: WebNoize).

Implications for content providers : Web Services

Efficiency

Web services will render business processes more efficient, whether through smoothing out the working of internal systems, or enabling automatic communications with suppliers and customers.

New services

Web services could be used to facilitate the implementation of a print-on-demand system, with orders coming in from the web being automatically forwarded to a web-enabled printing and binding system.

Implications for content providers : The Semantic Web

Revenues

Using metadata and other elements surroundin