Giorgio Riva, Managing Director of RCS Digital S.p.A.

A radical change is taking place in the media sector with regard to the role of technology connected to business. In this sector technological advancements have been almost always related to the printing and distribution process. Nevertheless, things have radically changed now.

RCS has been considerably dealing with new media innovation since 2003/2004. At the beginning of the Internet era (consisting of three different but converging elements: technology - as communication protocol - media and sales channel), media companies, RCS among the first, decided to focus on new technologies in a different way. In fact, ICT is certainly a more strategic than tactic enabler in a media company like RCS, where technology and innovation (process, product and technology innovation) really provide new business opportunities, more today than in the past.

RCS Digital’s products are quite recent and, first of all, have brought organizational innovation in the company. In 2005, for example, the online service was enriched with a video offer, and RCS Digital needed a technological infrastructure that didn’t exist before (like the 2 TV studios in via Solferino), while some of its journalists had to learn the “art” of  working on TV. This means a radical change in a media company like RCS, historically devoted to traditional publishing. In only two years and a half technology helped to create such a wide video offer that in 2007 RCS Digital’s sites provided more video streaming than the main US online publishers.

A similar process occurred within the Mobile. RCS is the first publisher in Europe (and with respect to the US market, too) for the number of active registered customers of the pay-per-use mobile services. To obtain these results we had to radically innovate the offer through technology and design, dealing with the concept of multiplatform applications: “we have learnt that is not enough to transfer, from a device to another, a digital publishing product, believing that the user interaction style remains the same”.

An example of offer innovation is the creation of RCS DB Games, a joint venture with Digital Bros, a listed company and market leader in the console videogame distribution. Last September RCS DB Games, the 51% of which belongs to RCS Digital and the 49% to Digital Bros, launched an online and mobile casual gaming service, so that it could provide the 15-16 million users visiting RCS Digital’s websites every month with a wider offer, based on a new technological platform. So, on the last 18th of September we launched Fueps.com and today, after only 5 months, it counts more than 200 thousand registered users: at least 100 thousands of them visit the site back every month.

Last but not least, since RCS offers products that have to be easy-to-use by customers, also the design becomes an essential and strategic element. In fact, Corriere della Sera.it website has been already renewed twice during the last two years and a half. Starting from RCS target user peculiarities we have specifically focused on the product design and usability and then created all its functional components.

To sum up, design has a key importance for a media company offering products that are required to work according to the single devices’ peculiarities and be appreciated by users in different ways: in front of a TV display or a PC and every time they use these kinds of services and products on mobile devices.