Media and Entertainment Transition to the Digital Age

With analog content migrating online becoming a generalized trend, Microsoft aims to keep itself at center-stage and has revealed that it is hard at work building new solutions designed to enable the migration of traditional media and entertainment content to the digital supply chain. In this context, the Redmond company announced the inking of a strategic alliance with Ascent Media Group focused on supporting the entertainment industry in its transition to the digital age. The new solution being built together with Ascent Media Group will have the MicrosoftDynamics AX at the core.

"The transformation to an all-digital world has completely redefined how the media industry creates, manages and delivers rich media content," explained Martha Béjar, corporate vice president for the Communications Sector at Microsoft. "However, the business processes that support the entire digital value chain have not necessarily kept pace, and currently hinder the effective monetization of that content. The partnership we have forged with Ascent draws on our companies’ respective strengths and expertise, and will result in new business management solutions and services that address the specific requirements of the media and entertainment industry."

Dynamics is essentially an array of management solutions from the Redmond company covering financial, customer relationship and supply-chain handling tasks. But the new Microsoft-Ascent product will go one step further and will offer not only business process management but also media and entertainment functionality. Media companies will be able to tap a hosted version of the solution directly from Ascent and, with it, content formatting, distribution and integration services.

"The delivery of media over a wide range of devices has added tremendous complexity to the digital workflow process," added Jose Royo, CEO of Ascent Media Group. "That complexity has given us an opportunity to develop new services that help alleviate the pains being felt by our customers. Our strategic alliance with Microsoft not only delivers a new business system backbone that will help streamline our own production workflows and order management, but also allows us to create additional revenue streams through new service offerings."

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