You Need
September Summary
Mort de Multimedia
September 2000
Roger Bates collects old radios. Everyone knows that. The dozen or so wireless sets on the shelf at the Northern ACE Centre were just the sprats. The mackerels were lined up in shoals on the steel shelves of his large basement in Manchester. Hundreds. Twenty of one model with different dial detail or case colour. I've been friends with Roger since 1986. He had more than two hundred radios then and he is still buying them.
Roger also collects failed technologies. My favourite is a German tape recorder with machined steel drums like giant cotton reels running about twenty-five feet of 15 inch wide tape. These drums ran at gyroscopic speed and when they reached the end of the tape, the sudden WHACK of displaced energy would have flipped a small caravan over. Among these technologies are teaching machines: the simplest was a printed card of questions with holes punched by each. Poke the right hole with the stylus and the bulb lit. The inventor had discovered the basic pedagogy and the features of much of the educational software which followed twenty years later. Technologies still fail now, others just don't get used as intended.
When Tomorrow's World previewed the Sinclair Spectrum they prophesied that people would use it to play games, control their finances and to run their central heating! When the CD-ROM was introduced it was to be the medium of interactive multimedia. Publishers felt bad if they had not crammed all 720 Mb with searchable information, sound and video. Actually the CD was just a bigger floppy that you couldn't write to. Practically all software is now distributed on CD. Discs are much too small and the web much to slow. But the educational multimedia CD as a concept is practically dead.
This is important. David Putnam saw Britain's future as "the Hollywood of educational media" yet it is hard to see the tiny sales of multimedia "content" fuelling anything much. Look at REM's top ten; look at ours when it is published next month. The top selling software is all "tools" or "tutors". If you want to write stories or make multimedia it is all there for you; if you want to learn to type or to spell or to add and subtract that is pretty well covered too. If you want to experience plate tectonics, World War II or the animals of Africa at third hand then the CEOs of the major multimedia houses will want to plant a sloppy kiss on your forehead. Nobody seems to want that stuff any more.
Good multimedia needs a huge cast of creatives to produce it. A competent multimedia product might cost £250,000 to develop. Yet school sales are unlikely to be 2500 copies over the product's life. That's £100 each just to develop (not to make or to market) a product you are going to sell for a maximum of £50!
Their are two major players left in the educational multimedia CD market. Granada Learning (previously known as Yorkshire International Thomson Multimedia) may be the largest, yet their last published accounts showed less than £5 million turnover, and half of this is SEMERC. But even Granada's tiny £2.5 million sales of mainstream multimedia beat Anglia Multimedia who recorded £1.8 million in sales (about the same as Inclusive Technology's turnover). Their seventy excellent educational products must average around 500 copies per year each. Anglia made a loss of £1.2 million on its sales of £1.8 million; Granada Learning lost over £10 million in a couple of years by writing off development costs. They are both marching to a drum we can't yet hear.
Both Granada and Anglia are owned by TV companies - as of this summer by the same TV company - Granada. Anglia MultiMedia, I know, are waiting for the right medium, almost certainly online TV, to "publish" their content. Granada have taken a different tack and purchased both "tool" companies like Black Cat and "tutor" companies like Letts and NFER Nelson. Again their target is online - probably through your TV set. Their accidental acquisition of Anglia Multimedia was a miniature consequence of Granada Media (an eight billion pound company) buying Anglia TV. I doubt if Granada Learning would actually have chosen to buy Anglia Multimedia.
So the multimedia CD is probably heading for a place in Roger's Cellar.
Floppy, CD or online, Inclusive Technology aims to provide access to the medium and to the message. We provide the assistive technology resources so that your child can join in with what all of the others are doing. And when what they are doing changes to something else, we will provide access to that too. Much of our software provides vital early learning experiences that are just not available for some learners away from the computer. We also provide "tools" and training materials, "tutors", so that children can prepare themselves for a world where other "tools" will make them more powerful and productive.
Our new catalogue comes out in October. Email me and we will send you one.
Martin Littler - martin@inclusive.co.uk