With the development of new technologies come new media. With the advent of the printing press, books were a new medium. The specific term new media, however, refers to digital communication, including material published on or for use on a computer or the Internet, as well as on CD-ROM, DVD, mobile devices, and digital television. It is contrasted with old media, which includes print publishing of books, newspapers, and magazines, as well as analog radio and television. New media solutions are products, services, or a combination of the two that address a need involving new media. New Media Solutions is also the name, or part of the name, of a number of companies providing new media solutions.
Creating new media solutions for some old media companies has involved creating a new media presence while maintaining their older practices as well. This is true for newspapers that have an online edition that is updated much more frequently than a morning and evening edition, and print magazines that are updated much more frequently than once a week. Network television broadcast stations have moved to posting their shows — albeit often with different and shorter advertising — on sites like Hulu®.
There really isn’t usually such a thing as a singular new media solution because moving to or incorporating new media usually involves a wide range of skills, techniques, and technologies. Take a retailer that wants to become an e-tailer, that is, expand business to the Internet. This move may require the porting of branding and logos used in print documents to a digital version, the design of an ecommerce website, the choice of domain name, the development of a company blog and approach to using Twitter® and Facebook®, the development of online advertising campaigns, possibly involving videos that are posted on YouTube®.
Adopting new media solutions does not simply mean incorporating new media and fresh, forward-looking designs that appear on the Internet rather than on billboards and in newspapers. For ecommerce start-ups, for example, successful new media solutions also depend on having supporting infrastructure, including computers with adequate power and storage, appropriate network connections, and an adequate hosting plan for a website with an ISP (Internet Service Provider) that provides security, data redundancy, reliability, and 24/7 support. Also needed is an IT team or a contractor with the requisite skills, specifically, a webmaster and possibly content developers to maintain and grow the new media into the future.
