Spotification - the future for digital standards?
In the real world, color approval
processes are a mix of physical and digital. But it should be in the interests
of the spectrophotometer suppliers for the process to go as far down the
digital route as possible, as the more digital it goes, the more spectros will
be needed. It is possible to imagine a world in which standards providers would
also favor the digital process – they are the owners of the specifically named color
as expressed by the physical and the digital standards, and if they could
charge the same for every copy of the digital version as they could for every
physical copy, they would have much lower costs and much higher profits. In the
real world, though, they can not. This is not so much related to the pricing of
the digital versus physical standards as to to the copyability of each type. It
is obviously very hard to make a perfect copy of a physical color standard, but
very easy to perfectly copy a digital measurement file. The copyability of the
digital file is made even easier by the fact that the key data it contains is
only 31 numbers and that it can also be subject to “analog capture” (any software
that shows the data as a table or as a graph with data labels can be used to
take a screen shot even if the file can
not be read directly) but there is an additional significant reason: it seems reasonable to assume that it will
always be in the interest of the spectro makers to make measurement files easy
to copy. This assumption seems to be supported by the observation that the
industry standard qtx file is still be in standard text file format, and the later
cxf alternative is in open XML format.
There is a strong parallel here
with the music industry. Once upon a time someone wishing to listen to a song
in a time and place of their own choosing had to purchase a physical copy of a
vinyl record. Once music could be digitised, they could still buy MP3 files if
they wished, but it was also much easier to obtain free copies from friends, or
cheap ones on dodgy marketplaces. And whilst the data owners (record companies)
tried hard to stop such piracy, the producers of the MP3 players, or of the
recorders that created the MP3 files, had very little interest in doing so.
Like the record companies,
standard providers have tried several ways to make their libraries less
copyable, for example by putting encrypted versions of their libraries inside
the software provided with spectros by their producers. Apart from being an
unlikely mix of interests in the long run, this also sets up significant
complications in areas such as updating the libraries across different software
versions and does not seem to be a long term option, any more than it was for
similar approaches in the music industry.
So what has been the most
successful recent business model to evolve recently in the music industry? Probably
the "streaming”or “Spotify” model, where online software stores libraries of
digital content and consumers pay in some way (sometimes financially, sometimes
by being forced to view adverts) to access a selected music file, without ever
getting to own or be able to copy the file itself. At this point it should be
noted that whilst a consumer of digital music requires only a software player,
a consumer of digital color requires a software “comparer”. Human color vision
and digital color science are both based almost entirely on comparison, of one
color to one or more other colors – a single color measurement is a sad, lonely
and largely useless thing. So any color equivalent of the Spotify player must
be able to bring in color data owned by the consumer, or chain of consumers,
and compare it with the data owned by the standard provider without allowing
access to the standard data directly.. Which makes it clear that “color
Spotify” will need to be resident in the cloud..
Can such a model be developed?
The answer to that question is yes, in fact it already has been. Online
software such as palettemanager.com from Colourmart Software allows standards
providers to upload their libraries to it with absolute control over any user’s
access to the color data… the user can pay per use, for a time based
subscription, or in any other way the data owner wishes… the user can also
order physical standards if required… just as important, the software also
includes the functionality for the user to assign the standards to other users
in her supply chain, and for her or the assigned users to upload measurements
that they own to compare against the standards… plus the usual palette
development functions, lab dip approval workflows… in fact the whole panoply of
functions available in standalone color software..
So is this the way forward for
color standards providers? It seems at least worth exploring…