Sky+ a Well Timed Innovation?

I always find it interesting when businesses think innovatively, adapting their business models to provide better services for their customers. Sometimes these innovations radically change previous perceptions, I think that two of the current mainstream radical innovations are iTunes and Sky+.

iTunes

iTunes came to market a few years ago and turned the traditional music consumer market on it’s head. Giving users the ability to rapidly purchase singles or albums at a lower price than from high-street music shops. Downloading music from the internet was a widely discussed subject due to the availability of illegal music online. When iTunes launched, it was a mainstream easy-to-use system offering a legal way to purchase mp3′s on the internet.

Sky+

Sky+ also came to market (in the UK) a few years ago. Sky turned home recording on its head – previously consumers purchased a TV, satellite receiver and a video recorder and they could record what they wanted when required, albeit only being able to record one satellite channel at once. Sky+ was introduced providing the ability to record two channels and watch a recording at once. Now the consumer purchased a more expensive new satellite receiver which had built-in recording capabilities. Interestingly consumers also now paid a monthly fee to allow them to use the recording capabilities (or be on a high-monthly package). I think that timing of this was critical, digital was becoming mainstream and consumers were investing in digital technologies.

Recently I noticed this kind of innovative thinking being applied to the home smoke-alarm market. Manufacturers selling units with built-in batteries which would last several years. When the batteries run out, the consumer simply buys a replacement unit. The manufacturer benefits by essentially creating a market of repeat purchasers, the consumer has the confidence in the unit lasting for a number of years and each time they replace their device they will get a device with the latest safety legislation built-in.

Post Editing of Machine Translation

This year we introduced Post Edit Machine Translation (PEMT) to our customers (For more information see PEMT ). This innovation is a new offering, giving customers the option to have a hybrid machine translation + human post-edit solution. This helps our corporate customers by bridging the gap between traditional translation and machine translation – finding a reasonable balance between cost, speed and quality which is suitable for some types of documents. This allows our customers to lower the cost of translation and increase turn-around where quality is not the highest priority (usually internal documents), but where the translation quality does need to be higher than machine translation.

Like other innovations, the timing of this offering was critical, meeting the new needs of customers by lowering cost during the recession and at the same time gaining the acceptance from professional translators, who have become more accepting of post-editing Machine Translated documents. The offering has been very well received and I expect the market (and quality) of this work will increase dramatically over the coming years.