Is mediatech the new fintech?

The mediatech revolution is well underway. It’s in our lounge rooms, bedrooms and on our way to and from work. We’re tuning into Spotify, playing Fortnite and watching Netflix into the wee hours like there’s no tomorrow.

The term “mediatech” has been used for over a decade to label startups with a media and technology focus in the age of the web.

There are now more than twice as many private companies worth more than US$1 billion (also known as unicorns) in mediatech today (116) than as in the more well-known financial technology (fintech) sector (52).

Today’s tech giants including Apple, Microsoft and Adobe all have their roots in media technology for the personal computer at the famous Xerox PARC – the revolutionary media research lab that reinvented the modern office in an age of the personal computer. Its legacy includes many of the things we take for granted in computers today such as the familiar windows, icons, mouse and pointer-driven graphical user interface, local networking and the faithful reproduction on printers of what you see on the screen.

So far however there has not yet been a mediatech “movement” in the way the 2015 fintech rush took off. Perhaps that is because many mediatech companies are still seen as music, games, photography, or advertising tech companies.

Many of the today’s largest players in financial services are fintechs from another era. Bloomberg, Vanguard and Computershare all began as pioneers at the intersection of technology and differing areas of financial services: revolutionising and later dominating the market data, index fund and share registry sectors respectively. Read more

Paul X. McCarthy - Smart Company - 17 Apr 2018