Managing Entertainment through Creativity: the music production software market

Chapter One: A broader market overview on the DCCS Arena 1.1- What is the DCCS? A definition of Digital Content. Digital Content Creation Software (DCCS) enable the creation or modification of digital content such as animation, audio, graphics, images or video, as part of the production process before presentation in its final medium. Thus, the production output is conventionally definable as audible, visual or combined material stored in a binary format represented by one of the following data classifications: - Time-based material, stored as pixels-per-time intervals or samples-per-time intervals, such as those animations, audio tracks, films or videos stored as “fps” (frames per second). - Rendered-based material, stored as mathematical equation or numerical dataset, such as 2D/3D designs, models and objects or spatial audio, in form of vectors or a scene graph. - Raster-based material stored as fixed pixels, such as images, pictures and photographs, in a variety of formats including bitmap, jpeg or similar files. A brief description of the DCCS market. All the digital content creation softwares discussed in this paper are applications running on PC based platforms or UNIX workstations. The whole DCCS Market grew slightly (1%) from 2001 to 2002( from $2.702 billion to $ 2.730 billion), a period in which many mergers and acquisitions were getting put into action both from companies traditionally operating in the industry, and from new players. Furthermore, the 2001/2002 landscape saw numerous companies drawing their attention to the creation and exploitation of a mass market, investing a relevant amount of money, and marketing resources and organisational efforts in the development of easy-to- use DCCS and the fostering of new mass market-specific managerial capabilities 1 . As later on explained, an effective business expansion upon a mass- target has shown to be a common challenge for all the operators 1 Either by means of internal development or by means of top- professionals acquisitions, in the so- called “rush for customer knowledge”.