I heard the following definition of digital content last week. “Digital content is everything delivered over a high speed telecommunications network”. It came from someone with a media background, so it is understandable that the application to display/play the content, whether Realplayer for Music/Video or a Patient Records application for an MRI image set, gets demoted.

Going back to the conversation with the DTI folk (below), if you ignore the detail of protocol stacks and focus on “application and content”, Digital Communications as a term to describe the combination of content, software and telecommunications makes some sense.

Of course what all this discussion masks is that human (business) need we are talking about here is people communicating knowledge. In most cases remotely both in the physical sense and in the sense that they often don’t know each other.

A good example of this is accountancy software like Sage or Quickbooks. I have no personal relationship with the people that develop an acountancy package, but their in depth knowledge of book-keeping allows me to maintain my own accounts and reduce the costs of running a business.

So I’m starting to think that Digital Content is in fact part of Digital Communications which is actually about Communicating Knowledge. The digital bit is just another revolution in a similar vein to the printing press, photography and television.