Multimedia is an emerging knowledge-based industry which is creating a lot of sustainable job opportunities for workers and new market opportunities for their employers. Multimedia companies tend to be small businesses with less that a total of 10 employees. In a recent survey, it was estimated that nearly 51% of all companies in this industry tend to belong to this category. While most of the employees get ancillary benefits, a small percentage of the employees work on short-term contracts.
The prime source of revenue for multimedia companies is through website development. The next biggest source of business is from the education and training market. While of late, the video gaming and entertainment businesses are growing at a rapid pace. Hence, it is predicted by analysts that in another 5 years “video gaming and entertainment” would replace “website development” as the leading source of revenue.
The term “multimedia” has come to represent applications and technologies that transform textual, visual and aural data. These applications also support the interactive usage of audio and video streams. In other words, multimedia is the presentation of information in a combination of multiple types of data ranging from text, graphics, animation and video.
So from the above definition we learn that the market for the multimedia industry is very broad. With the advent of newer technologies and computerization of traditional institutions, the industry is set to expand exponentially over the next few decades.
With the integration of more than one medium of data presentation, more sophisticated business models have to be invented to suit this new business terrain. This increase in complexity also adds to the hassles of “intellectual property” and “information security”. So much so that these two terms always find mention in all discussions of multimedia.
References:
Bellotti, V. & Rogers, Y., 1997, From Web press to Web pressure: multimedia representations and multimedia publishing, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in …, 1997 – portal.acm.org
Drew, M.S. & Li, Z.N., 2004, Fundamentals of Multimedia, School of Computer Science Publication, Canada, 2004