Online content may not be free for long

Growing cost of online content is compelling industry leaders to charge for subscriptions and the information parted on those in order to add value to their portals, according to Deloitte's predictions for 2010.

A high-profile executive team of the global business advisory firm Deloitte gave a special privy of 2010 trends in the technology, media and telecommunications sector at the Predictions 2010: Global Innovation for the TMT Market" seminar hosted by Dubai Media City.

In an elaborate presentation, Paul Lee, Director, Knowledge and Research, said the New York Times was conducting a survey on its site asking readers if they would pay up to $5 (Dh18.3) per month for subscription. The subscription fee is proposed to be $2.50 for hard copy subscribers.

"If this is any indication of the intentions of big media players," said Lee "it will encourage many more players in the industry to start charging for content."

In fact, Rupert Murdoch has been on an international campaign to convince major industry players to start charging for content. During a quarter-four earnings call recently, Murdoch, News Corp Chairman and CEO, told analysts and reporters: "We intend to charge for our news websites. The Wall Street Journal's WSJ.com is the world's most successful paid news site and we will be using our profitable experience there and the resulting skills throughout News Corp to increase our revenues from all our content."

Executives are "leading a company-wide effort to establish a new economic model to profitably transition our print properties to digital," he addded.

While such actions add value to the content, "cinema will also undergo technical changes in their content capturing and presentation – moving from 2D to 3D", said Lee, shedding light on the future of cinema in 2010.

"Our findings reveal that 3D will lead the cinema drive and it's the x-factor that will attract the crowd to theatres, taking its fair share from home cinema," said Lee.

The findings also predicted that in order to support the 3D march, there will be more than 20,000 3D cinemas all worldwide by the end of 2010. And this would be possible only when 3D capture technology improves, bringing down the production cost of 3D films.

Deloitte predictions also revealed television viewing habits that clearly put linear television viewing at ease. "Less than 10 per cent of TV watchers would watch any kind of TV programmes online," said in his presentation.

He added that broadcasters remains one of the biggest contributors to online TV and that creates no competition for linear TV, but in fact complements it.

Concluding his presentation, Lee shared facts about new concepts such as e-reading technology.

"Considering that there are only four books a person to read every year even in a market like the United Kingdom, it leaves very little room for making it a commercial success in the near future," he said.

And as novels on e-books are still a novelty and with business and academic text already available on the web or in the digital format, e-books will continue to be remain novelty for some time to come.

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